two audiences

John Updike on the scintillating world of book covers.

Excerpt: The postwar book designer has two audiences—other designers, who applaud daring, witty “creative expression,” and the bookstore browser, whose supposed interests are ever more zealously safeguarded in “a corporate environment where marketing analysts, editorial boards, and authors insist on significant participation in the design process.” In this board of overseers, authors have the disadvantage of an intimate and proprietorial acquaintance with the text, while the marketing analysts have only a record of previous flops and successes to go by, and no way of producing that impression of something new which is one ingredient of a commercial success in the creative arts. In the end, nobody buys a book jacket, though sometimes a jacket—like Robert Scudellari’s inviting, bright-red wrapper for the very successful “Stories of John Cheever” (1978), with its huge silver “C”—does cheer on searchers for a Christmas present to bestow.