But You Can Judge the Cover...

About a week ago I remarked upon the review of an interesting book about the development of book indices. I was dismayed that our cousins across the pond could already enjoy this journey while we would have to wait until February. The British edition was already on sale from Amazon's UK site and could be ordered, so I decided to experiment and do so. After all, the internet has taught us that we are entitled to whatever we want immediately, and I am nothing if not a dutiful student.

It's very likely to be a non-repeated event. The cost of the book itself wasn't much more than the planned US edition but those Limey so-and-sos insisted that someone be paid to ship the book to me. My Amazon Prime talisman was no match for their nefarious claims of distance, oceans and whatnot and so the eventual price wound up weighing much more. At least I think it was a matter of weight, since all of the numbers they used referred to pounds. But the conversion tables may be off, because this book weighs nowhere near the 27 pounds Amazon's UK site labeled it as.

In any event, it arrived in less than a week -- O modern world that has such shipping in it -- and I noticed how different the UK edition cover -- on the left -- was than what is shown as the US cover -- on the right. UK publisher Allen Lane created their cover with some oldish-looking type over a detail from a 1480 German woodcut titled, "Learning to Read." US publisher W. W. Norton & Company provides a dust jacket that is simultaneously boring and ugly. It resembles a design software tutorial in how to color type complete with the click buttons for each color in the corner, overlaid on a background left over from the creation of reflective highway signs.

I read a blasphemous internet article once that suggested when one considered one's books solely for decorating purposes (therein the blasphemy), they actually looked better without their dust jackets than with them. W. W. Norton & Company earns no applause for creating this example of when that writer was very likely correct.