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Judging books by their covers,
Revolve: The Complete New Testament Wuthering Heights In his 1999 film Dogma, Kevin Smith posited what it would look like if the Catholic Church decided to try to overhaul its image in order to attract new young members. The most significant change involved throwing out the crucifix as the main visual reference. Too much of a downer. The proposed replacement was a smiling Jesus giving two thumbs-up. That Kevin Smith — so ahead of his time. Four years ahead, apparently, because here’s Revolve: The Complete New Testament, by Nelson Bibles. (Though it appears that Nelson Bibles, whose other works include Extreme Teen Bible, isn’t apparently someone’s name, though wouldn’t it be, like, totally appropriate if it were?) Revolve looks just like a girl’s fashion magazine cover, right down to the lower-case nameplate, and it’s meant to; it wants to grab you by the spaghetti straps and convince you that Scripture is cool. I’m not sure what the title refers to, but there are all those circles underneath the logo, so it must mean something, unless the publisher just thinks that teenaged girls are still way into Spirograph. But more about the design: it’s a cold day in hell when you praise a teen fashion magazine for showing some design restraint, but between Revolve and a random sample of Seventeen magazine, you have to hand it to Seventeen for putting a lid on excess. Both magazines go crazy with umpteen different type treatments crowding the left and right sides of each cover. This is apparently meant to play to the whims of a teenaged girl; any day she picks up the magazine — or the Bible — she apparently says to herself, Today I’m in a lower-case (or upper-case, or black headline, or white headline, or, omigod, a QUIZ!) kinda mood. The magazine — or the Bible — wants to be there for every mood, every whim. At least Seventeen sticks to a somewhat reserved palette from which it paints its variations: they’re all in one typeface, albeit different weights, and they’re limited to three colors, albeit different shades. Revolve, on the other hand, features: two different typefaces that clash with each other; five different colors; and every single combination of type style and color the designer could muster. It seems like the designer doesn’t know the audience that well and is trying to glean that knowledge by looking at actual teen fashion magazines and appropriating their design ideas without really understanding them. The worst part, I think, is that the subtitle, The Complete New Testament, is hidden in plain view. All the other typography obscures it. The few people I showed the cover to just thought it was a new fashion magazine until I pointed out the subtitle. It seems almost as if the publisher wants to fool teenagers into reading the Bible. If you want to make the argument that the Bible is cool, more power to you — but you shouldn’t have to resort to tricks to do it.
Speaking of hiding vegetables in fast food, MTV’s doing it too. The channel that might as well be run by the devil himself is trying to fool kids into reading actual literature by repackaging Wuthering Heights as a novelization of “Dawson’s Creek.” It’s actually Wuthering Heights, which is astounding, given that MTV took quite a few liberties with its made-for-TV adaptation, changing character names, situations, etc. I think variations can be wonderful complements to their sources, as I pointed out in an earlier essay. But then to turn around and try to suggest that the two are practically equal seems less like an honest interest in having viewers read a classic than it is an attempt to try to appease educators and parents who might be put off by the adaptation. I mean, MTV gets higher billing by far than Emily Brontë. For crap’s sake, Erika Christensen practically gets higher billing. It would be like Nelson Bibles sticking “God” in the lower-right corner of the cover of Revolve. This should be the cover of the novelization, not the novel. Sacrilege and irresponsibility aside, it’s decent graphically. It’s clean, and it wears its bright colors tastefully (except for the reverse bar below the title). I’m just so tired of publishers pandering to their audiences. Judgement: Who am I to talk? I read Wuthering Heights because Kate Bush wrote a song about it.
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