Some trends, like hand-lettered titles or nostalgic 1950s graphics will come and go, while covers that feature an image of a woman turning her back from the viewer, for example, are so everlasting that some writers have joked they should be their own category. It seems that the frappuccino trend will likely go the way of the first camp: ephemeral as ever, and overworked enough to eventually go out of style before something new replaces it. But how did such a trend start in the first place? And what does it say about the publishing industry when covers are designed based on the psychology of the busy browser? Members of the publishing community were able to help me demystify some of the cultural and economic forces that intermingle to produce a book’s final visual identity.
While we have a tendency to define ourselves based on our likeness to other things—we say humans are like a god, like a clock, or like a computer—there is a countervailing impulse to understand our humanity through the process of differentiation. And as computers increasingly come to take on the qualities we once understood as distinctly human, we keep moving the bar to maintain our sense of distinction.
All this made me wonder, Could I, a stuffy Canadian with lifelong body hang-ups, be brave enough to join the beer-sipping, wurst-grilling sunbathers? Living in a pseudo naturist commune or attending a nude parental meet-and-greet felt a stretch beyond my comfort zone, but two months into my new German life, I decided to get over my fear.
Sophie Hannah’s books got me every time, the twist throwing me a curveball I never saw coming. It was a rush, and I became addicted to it. Every time Hannah came out with a new psychological thriller, I snagged it. Each time I was amazed at the inventiveness of her plots. I’d read the back-cover copy and think: how will she ever pull this one off?
W.E.B. Du Bois has been a part of my intellectual life for as long as I can remember. At 16, I moved to Great Barrington, Mass., to attend Bard College at Simon’s Rock. Great Barrington was the birthplace of Du Bois, and as I learned when I was named a Du Bois scholar, the great man was so many things: an elder statesman of African American life, a distinguished historian, a sociologist, a civil-rights leader and an early model of what it might mean to be a public intellectual. He is, many would argue, the founding father of modern Black America. His writing, his ambitions, his failings and his accomplishments are the bass line of Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s sweeping, masterly debut novel, “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.”
For every stoner who has been overcome with profound insight and drawled, “Reality is a construct, maaan,” here is the astonishing affirmation. Reality – or, at least, our perception of it – is a “controlled hallucination”, according to the neuroscientist Anil Seth. Everything we see, hear and perceive around us, our whole beautiful world, is a big lie created by our deceptive brains, like a forever version of to placate us into living our lives.
Surely there must be something beautiful to smile upon—
the umbered blue edge of sky as it fades into evening,