Why are book covers generally so unartistic and fashionable in contrast to album covers?
pic related seems like one of the few exceptions.
>tfw you figure out why the book cover is what it is
Penguin is really good at making it somewhat challenging. It's like the /lit/ version of a maze on the back of a cereal box
You gotta pull people in. Music you can just turn on and listen for a minute to see what it's like, books are a mental commitment
>>7736755
because literature takes much more effort to derive satisfaction from, and is therefore a little bit more resistant to bourgeois commodity fetishism such as the kind flagrantly displayed in your post. only a little bit, though; and in an era defined by the double-edged sword of minimalism and irony, books can be reified as "les objets d'arts" not only because of their often simple designs, but in fact because of it.
>>7736783
not only despite**, my bad. got ahead of myself
This image is worthy of Man Ray. It is all at once a mouth, an eye, and a "cunt", per the filename. Some ideas to OP's point:
Historically, mass production of books, that is, AFTER the printing press, and once Books were no longer lavish one-off love letters from a monk, entailed simple text on the exteriors. Design didn't really flare up (again) until later. I would suspect and suggest that the better illustrative/artistic designs around books as objects were focused around children's books (Struwwelpeter, Grimm, Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark, etc). The rest was just grumpy text or machine diagrams until circa 150-100 years ago when woodcuts fell away and it became feasible to compile print with photo-real imagery, post-photography. Even photography has a "literal" sensibility, and is not associated with the fantastic or childish like painting, drawing, or illustration. It is more "adult". Obvious exceptions include doctored photos, the "fairies" photography hoax, etc. But we perceive these more as lies than as innocent fantasy.
So, if I'm onto anything of merit at all (that is, if my thing is even historically true), we got the notion of illustrated books as "unserious", feeding into perception of comics.. We get our visual jollies elsewhere, until photography comes along. My suggestion being that in the world of straight-print, this "seriousness" feeds into boring, drab, safe cover choices.
>>7736783
What a terribly written paragraph.
>"more effort to derive satisfaction from"
Compared to what? You didn't say. (Hint: Yes, you do have to say, or at least point towards. Your thing is much less rhetorically effective as a reult).
>Let me try out sum Marxism okay that went good for a test-drive with these ideas, yeah, fuck entertainment!
>Here now, let me string together more Babby-Marxist phrases and fake like I'm saying something
>"not only BECAUSE of... but in fact BECAUSE of..."
Since the lack of substance has already been addressed, it's just as well to throw in by this point that you didn't capitalize a thing you should have.
Does anyone have an EPUB/PDF of this book in English? Don't want to buy a copy and too embarrassed to check it out from the library desu.
>>7736755
New Directions has some really good covers.
>>7737203
shit book tho
