Featuring a Bill Plympton-esque illustration framed by an earthy green, the Warner Bros softcover edition of Geek Love perhaps gives you a quick idea of what the book will contain, but it lacks the thoughtful insight of Kidd’s work, prepping you for a pulpier, more blunt story than what Dunn’s breakout novel actually is. softcover edition, loaned to me by a teacher who insisted I read Dunn’s novel, and it serves as a handy antithesis of the Kidd cover. I ended up with a battered copy of the Warner Bros. The first copy of Geek Love I acquired was not this edition. And it’s important to keep in mind that this flew completely in the face of what book design was like in the era that Geek Love was released. It’s a simple cover that nonetheless contains immense depth, only really making sense once you’ve finished the book, masterfully revealing nothing on a first glance. In her essay at Wired for the book’s 25th anniversary, Caitlin Roper singled out the book’s “idea of a character’s strangeness as the source of her strength,” comparing it to the weirdos in comic books and arguing that “the book inverted the cold adolescent truth that what makes you different curses you.” What makes Kidd’s subtle design so powerful is how it channels this, commenting on it through font layout and visual jokes rather than through more obvious carnival imagery or exploitative illustrations. If you look closely, though, you see that every element of the cover is “mutated,” from the misshapen letters in the font to the addition of an extra leg to the Knopf dog on the spine. Initially, it seems there are no flourishes to the cover, its only eye catching trait that vivid orange and the more muted blue text. But even if you know Kidd’s work, his cover for the original 1989 release, when he was brand new to the industry, is a bit of an outlier. Kidd is of course legendary for his approach to book design and is responsible for a lot of the trends we now see in modern cover design. Years later, longer after I read the book, I would discover that its first edition design, the one that always scared me off in bookstores, was by rockstar book designer Chip Kidd and that many of the best elements of the cover flew completely over my head. I’d see its strange, nearly dayglo orange spine and the title and think it had something to do with geek culture then be baffled by the intimdatingly minimalist cover and walk away. Or more accurately, we judge the covers of books, examining the different aesthetics they’ve had through the years (and in some cases titles) to determine which are the most and least effective.Īs a teenager, I used to come across Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love constantly in used book stores before I realized what it was. Judging the Book By Its Cover is a column where we, you guessed it, judge books by their covers.
0 kommentar(er)
