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Judging books by their covers,
Diary Last month I gave Eric Schlosser some guff for his cover being sideways, but I did leave room for someone else to do it successfully. The designer of Chuck Palahniuk’s new cover has stepped up to the challenge and performed admirably. And if anyone can turn a book on its side, Palahniuk can. The author of Fight Club (among several other books) knows how to make you look at things in new ways. To a certain degree, looking at the scan here doesn’t do the cover justice. You’d have to see it up close and personal to get a sense of how rich the watercolors are. That these deep, beautiful colors run together to form these hulking letters on such a stark background is, to me, a wonderful use of contrast. The designer could have used big block letters instead, but it would have ended up being one-dimensional. Those colors invite you to linger. Moreover, the words seem like they have to be that big, like they have to fill up the cover, and so it’s necessary for them to be on their side. Had they been oriented the way we’d expect to see them, they’d have to be smaller, and we’d lose the various hues. The one thing I’m torn about is that Palahniuk’s name is left off the cover. On one hand, one can say it’s a bold move by an author whose large, devoted audience will probably already be looking for it; on the other, one can say it’s a stunt, merely designed to get you to ask yourself who wrote it, and you end up staying with it a little longer than you might have, just so you can find out. It happened to me that way. I think it’s kind of a stunt, but then, I’ve felt that way before about him. I still like the cover, though. Judgment: I wonder if the next novel will simply have Palahniuk’s name on the cover and no title. Peter Gabriel did it for his first three solo albums, and his devoted fans loved it, competing to try to convince each other that they knew the real title of each. I could see Palahniuk’s audience doing that. Oh yeah, totally.
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