Cover Story

My first real-world design job involved illustrating, writing and laying out my own children's book, as a college intern. Lots of rewrites, lots of script changes and arguments with the editors, many terrible sleepless nights, chewed-up brushes, shattered paint bottles and creative swearing cumulated in a published book that's currently on its third reprint (I think), selling quite well around the world. All I got paid for it back then was my intern's stipend, which was already more than I could've hoped for as a student. Six years since, I'm a fairly successful freelance designer. And I try not to take on too many publishing-related jobs these days. Only because the pay sucks, frankly.

Before I whine any more about sustenance, if you'll indulge me, I'd like to share with you a little theory I have on the genesis of Art. It debates the effect of time and technology on transforming the functional into the ornamental, and my context, for illustration, is the Book. To look at, it's not much more than a bit of reconstituted pulp held together by a thick cover and some string, but the Book carries in its genes the entire weight of human knowledge... No, wait, I may be overreaching already. Allow me to zoom in, or out, somewhat further: onto the book jacket, unworthy heir to Shakespeare's pop maxim on the dubious provenance of all that glisters. Danger of courting superficiality, you say? That's just the half of it.

Roughly three hundred years before the birth of Christianity, back when the Chinese were already busy inventing everything worth inventing including paper and beautiful calligraphy, some enterprising scholars in the ancient Greek town of Pergamon decided to combat Egyptian papyrus sanctions by binding together dried sheepskin and creating a prototype for the modern codex. By the 4th century AD, this practical design, the blueprint for the current day book, was being open-sourced across Western academia.

Legions of nerdy monks laboured away at scriptoria, crafting codices and more codices till their bald spots turned inky, efficiently split into gangs that specialised in binding, copying, editing, illumination and other major and minor aspects of book production. While this system has been propagated more or less unchallenged till date, all its intrinsic processes have been radically upgraded often through the ages, resulting in some curious shifts in the average book's appearance.

With the dawn of offset printing, the ubiquitous book jacket started acquiring a creative energy of its own. One of the first things you learn in design school is that “Form follows Function”. It's the basic principle behind good design, also applicable across all aspects of life in general, from the natural laws to elementary typography to how that last lemon cheesecake will punctuate tomorrow morning's ablutions. This principle works only up to the point where the human whim interjects, though.

Once the paperback emerged, Form started taking precedence over Function. Ease of production allowed for greater energies to be devoted to cosmetic concerns, such as the appearance of a product; and the book jacket, which till now was only a means of protecting the pages inside and a simple title-carrier, had become a mini advertising billboard, a merchandising tool. The logical next step, as with any medium of communication, might have been Art. It might yet be, for all we know.

Just as languages evolve from simple articulations of immediate needs like 'arrgh' and 'bleah' to complex poetries of ideas such as prickly pears and perambulations thereof, high Art too emerges from a protracted struggle out of the bounds of mere description. Designers like me have the mixed fortune of plying our trade in an evolving literary market. We're riding the cusp of a new digital era, when the book cover could go any which way.

The search engine, easy self-publishing and the portable reader have changed the nature of the book business. Standard book cover graphics are hardly suited to thumbnail views on Amazon, and it may soon get to the point, in a dystopian bookshop-less future, where the book cover becomes merely ornamental or entirely expendable all over again. Full circle. Then again, there is the question of whether, much of the time, the content of a book justifies an elaborate cover design at all. Would you buy a car for the way it looked or for what lies under the hood? Should cover designers feel a moral responsibility towards readers? Does the fate of humanity hinge on design processes? Oh, let's not get ahead of ourselves now.

My concern in all this is more than a little mercenary. I allude specifically to the Indian market. The odd Satyajit Ray (he designed some brilliant book covers in his day) who designs for the sake of design is rarer and rarer to find, and maybe that's because Art has grown beyond having to emerge via the struggles of the tired and hungry.

Or maybe high Art needs its high patronage, as history has repeatedly borne witness. But enough beating about the bush. The practical drift of my theory is that I want to be paid in proportion to my exertions. Indeed, this article is really a wage raise petition. Sneaky, you say? Yeah, well, never judge a book by its cover.

(Vaguely appending 'What's In A Cover' by Yamini Vijayan, the Sunday Herald, April 19 2009)