Reading: True/False - 2022 őszi

A great book might stay with us for a long time but, often, its cover does, too. There's a famous saying about never forming your opinion of a book by the jacket on it. But most readers know that we do judge books by their covers all the time. Everything about a book's cover - the font, the images, the colours - tells us something about what we can expect to find inside. A reader looking for some thrilling detective story is unlikely to reach for a pastel-coloured cover with a romantic design. Covers can be a swift way to signal genre, but the good ones do more than that. They give a face to a book's personality. They're what will make you pick it up in the first place, then keep it on your shelf to remind you what it meant to you. "When you're reading a book, it stays with you for a while, literally," says Donna Payne, creative director at Faber & Faber. The emergence of ebooks posed a threat to physical books a decade or so ago. But publishers fought back, making books that were more beautiful to look at and to hold than ever before. Fonts got bolder, colours are brighter. Alongside this, people increasingly started posting pictures of books on social media. Search #bookstagram on Instagram and you'll find more than 43 million images of books - next to cups of coffee, lying on crisp duvet covers, or perched on the edge of sun loungers. All this means cover design is more important than ever. "I think people are really appreciating it as art again," says Payne. But what makes a great cover? "For us, it's one that provokes a reaction of some sort. It might be that not everyone loves the cover. Or it might be that everyone is talking about it. But what we don't ever want to do is produce covers that are bland." Payne says creating a cover that is true to the book is just as important as creating something memorable. "You can publish an incredibly beautiful cover that leads people to believe it's a certain type of book, and if the reading experience is quite different from that, they feel they're not getting what they've paid for. You've failed in finding the right readers for that book."