From CBC.ca:

Like Trekkies or Beatles fanatics, James Bond buffs are proud of the factoid retention that comes with their obsessive fandom. Thus, when the Fleming Collection – an art museum originally endowed by Robert Fleming, financier grandfather of Bond creator Ian Fleming – announced the launch of an exhibit celebrating the cover art of James Bond novels, the calls started pouring in.

“We’ve had to deal with the fans every step of the way,” says Selina Skipwith, curator of Bond Bound. “The responses to the literature on our website were like” — and here she affects a drippy tone to mimic a Bond fan — “‘You say Fleming was 43 when he wrote Casino Royale, but in fact he turned 44 before he handed the manuscript to the publisher, Jonathan Cape.’”

Luckily, as keeper of the Fleming Collection, Skipwith is armed with more Bond minutiae than most aficionados. In preparation for the exhibit, which opened April 22, she returned to the Fleming oeuvre, rereading dozens of novels and comparing cover artwork from dozens of countries. Skipwith is the ultimate Bond girl – at least until late June, when the exhibit closes and, in all probability, London will be Bonded out.

Only in the U.K. would the curator of a major exhibit openly mock that exhibit’s target audience.

Graphics.com is offering an excerpt of Charlotte Rivers’s Book-Art: Innovation in Design, a review of new and interesting book design. Highlights include a book whose entire print run (750 copies) was buried and then dug up before being sold.

From Book-Art, via Graphics.com:

Buried features a collection of photos by Stephen Gill that were buried by the photographer, near where they were taken. [Designer Melanie] Mues used this as her inspiration for the design of the book, and buried each copy before retrieving and presenting them in a clean, blind-embossed slipcase. The result is that each book has different degrees of smudging and deterioration on the cover.

The rest of the featured designs are less radical, but still excellent examples of a designer engaging with and enhancing a book’s text. Conventional book design is all very well, but sometimes a book just needs an ear growing out of its spine (see further down on the linked page).

Here’s a cautionary tale about using stock photography. Grove Press loved the cover of the German edition of Sasa Stanisic’s first novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, so they used it for the U.S. edition, too. There was a surprise in store.

From New York Times reporter Dwight Garner’s blog, Papercuts:

Grove did all this without noticing that the man on the cover and the catalog is none other than Daniel Handler, the well-known novelist, musician and author of the Lemony Snicket books.

…

Handler – who says he found Stanisic’s novel charming – thinks he knows how this all happened in the first place.

“A friend of mine, Meredith, took a lot of photos of me at one point early in my career, and I was scarcely able to pay her. I said she could sell them wherever she wanted. And some of them ended up at Getty, filed not under my name but under ‘assorted’ or something.”

There’s a happy ending though, as Handler gave Grove permission to use the image, setting a new standard for least scandalous pre-career photos.

Canadian talent fared well in this year’s Oscar nominations, announced this morning. And in case you needed an excuse to catch the February 24 ceremony – if it happens – there’s a publishing tie-in, too.

Besides the best actress nod for Halifax’s Ellen Page for Juno, which is dominating Canadian headlines, Toronto director/actor/activist Sarah Polley is up for best adapted screenplay for her directorial debut Away From Her, based on the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Julie Christie also got a best actress nomination for her role in the film.

The news dovetails with a mini-debate on GalleyCat about how Polley’s film has accomplished the seemingly unthinkable by sexing up Alice Munro for a mass audience. Yesterday, a mildly scandalized reader complained about the new Vintage paperback edition for The View From Castle Rock (pictured above), first published in 2004.

“I saw the cover for the paperback of Alice Munro’s latest collection, The View from Castle Rock, in an ad in the NY Times Book Review,” a GalleyCat reader emails, “and Vintage has given the book a Sessalee Hensley makeover.” … [I]t’s not too hard to see what he’s talking about, although my reference point upon first glance wasn’t so much Hensley, the fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, as it was all those chick lit covers with women’s legs and no faces. (Not to mention the hot pink lettering; nice touch, that!) “While I understand the effort to sell more copies, it seems like a desperate approach for such a great writer,” our source continues, addressing the “chick lit” question directly: “Is that Vintage’s marketing strategy? I guess, if it gets Munro into more people’s hands it’s a good thing, but for me there’s a real disconnect in tone between the cover and the contents.”

Today, another reader rebuts by asking if Munro’s (or Munro’s publisher’s) concession to the marketplace is really such a big deal. After all, in CanLit, as in Canadian film, opportunities to sell out are few and far between.

Photography on book covers has become so common that most of us don’t even think about the connection between the image being used and the purpose it’s being used for. Not so for Karl Baden, an artist and photographer living in New York. Baden is in the process of compiling and annotating a huge collection of book covers that use photos, the whole thing part of an online archive at Covering Photography:

The idea for “Covering Photography” first occurred to me in 2002. I had fallen into the habit of haunting secondhand bookstores, spending hours searching, mostly without success, for classic photography books I couldn’t afford when I was younger, and are now as rare as hen’s teeth.

While prowling the stacks, I began to notice familiar images from the History of Photography on the covers of novels, textbooks and volumes of poetry; books whose nominal subject matter didn’t necessarily have a literal correspondence with the often iconic photographs that graced their jackets.

[…]

During it’s transformation from photograph to book cover, the original image is often cropped, colored, reversed or otherwise altered to fit the aesthetic intent of the designer or the more practical concerns of the publisher. In some cases the image has been re-staged by another photographer, or even copied into another medium. All this manipulation prompts the question: How is a photograph, initially conceived as an independent aesthetic object, re-used as a visual cipher for a book’s subject, or as an attention-getting sales device; i.e., how does a shift in context affect a photograph’s meaning?

There is no simple answer to this question.

All of this is heady stuff, though sometimes the question of a photo’s cover context is a very simple one, as in the case of, say, Pamela Anderson’s novel Star Struck. (Link not entirely safe for work. Or children. Or adults with a fear of silicone.)

The proverb about not judging books by their covers is put to the lie time and again in stores, where the poor old covers have only a few seconds to grab the potential reader’s eye. Many authors are keenly aware of that, which leads them to micromanage the designs for their books.

The blogosphere has produced two good examples of authorial interest in covers lately. Shameless magazine’s Stacey May Fowles is publishing her novel Be Good with Tightrope Books this fall, and she’s asking Shameless blog readers to vote on her two cover choices here. (Quillblog joins the current majority of comments in voting for the clean, spare, and stunning version one, hopefully an easy winner over the cluttered second option.)

In the not-clean-and-spare department, Managing Humans author Michael Lopp blogs here about his own cover design experience. When the first proposals showed up, he, uh, wasn’t thrilled.

Right. So, the book. 10 months of constant pessimism [about his book]. This is why when the first batch of covers for the book showed up, I thought, “Okay, good. I knew they’d be awful.”

Worst Case Scenario

Here. Play along at home.

Not complete disasters, but clearly cliché. I mean, c’mon — cheese? Didn’t we move our cheese around back in 1998?

So Lopp asked a friend, artist Kevin Cornell, to come up with artwork for a new cover. The final product, which the author loved, is a little fussy for Quillblog’s taste – but you, dear reader, can judge the cover (and the book) for yourself.

Chip Kidd, probably the only designer of book covers that most people have even heard of, is interviewed in Esquire magazine about some of the tricks of his trade. The books that Kidd works on very often become massive bestsellers, though he admits that’s only partly thanks to him. “I cannot make you buy a book, but I can try to help make you pick it up,” he tells the interviewer.

Kidd gives some background on three recent titles he has covered – House of Meetings by Martin Amis, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and The Terrorist by John Updike.

Maybe it’s just us, but the Updike and Amis covers look kind of bland and even ugly, which is odd, given Kidd’s reputation for pizzazz. The Road’s all-black cover is pretty cool, though. It’s like, how much more black could this cover be? And the answer is none … none more black.

In a cute stunt, Penguin U.K. has asked musicians to design new covers for six of its classic titles. As The Guardian reports, Beck took on the French novel Le Grand Meaulnes, Johnny Borrell of the band Razorlight did The Great Gatsby, and Ryan Adams did Dracula. Adams tells The Guardian he

used oil paints to create “a weird outline or silhouette juxtaposed with the idea of the castle - you know, Dracula’s headquarters, his hang.”

You can see all six musician-designed covers here. In Quillblog’s opinion, a couple are actually pretty cool, including Beck’s and Adams’, while others, like Borrell’s Gatsby cover, should remind the Penguin brass why they have real designers on the payroll.

Also being hyped is a reader-designed cover for Aesop’s Fables. A reader-designed cover? That’s right, this whole rock-star-cover thing is promoting an even cuter stunt: Penguin recently released a bunch of classic titles with blank front covers, encouraging viewers to design their own. The gallery of reader submissions is here.

Douglas Coupland is opening an art exhibit, aptly named The Penguins, in Toronto tomorrow, which features collages he has created with old covers of Penguin paperbacks. The show is the first of several he is planning that examine the “relationship between books and visual culture,” according to an enthusiastic post on the Torontoist.

The new show takes moldy, dusty and yellowed mass-produced Penguin paperbacks, and attempts to imbue them with the sense of vitality and energy that they once possessed. In 1935, The Penguins were famously successful on all levels: they were academically revered and founder Allen Lane wanted the books sold alongside cigarettes, at the same price.

….

Coupland is a visual writer who excels at many arts; the myth says that he hasn’t mastered any one form. Bollocks! Artist/poet William Blake had the same image problem back in the eighteenth century.

Drawing parallels with William Blake is heading into high altitudes, but photos of a few of the works shown on the Torontoist site and Coupland’s own do look pretty cool. Maybe not as avant-garde as the pages of Generation X that he “hand-chewed” and formed into a wasps’ nest, but still pretty cool.

GalleyCat is spreading the word (from Canadian bookseller Thomas of Première de couverture) about some really gorgeous design work that has been done for a Vintage Classics relaunch by Random House UK, with striking modern covers gracing a slightly odd selection of “classic” works. Here Trainspotting and Ripley’s Game are standing side-by-side with The Odyssey and The Rape of the Lock. Go figure.

Anyway, the covers are pretty. And, according to the bloggers, we in Canada will have access to them, while our American cousins won’t. We’ll also get special bundles such as Tom Jones plus The Rachel Papers and Middlemarch with Possession.

Talk about reader interactivity. Biblioasis will publish John Metcalf’s latest memoir, Shut Up He Explained, this fall. And a reader of the Windsor publisher’s blog has designed the book’s cover.

It all began when Biblioasis posted some of its own early designs on its blog and asked for reader feedback. One reader, Brenda Schmidt, went one better and up and designed a cover herself, and Biblioasis owner Dan Wells liked it so much that he’s decided to go with it.

The total cost? Wells says Schmidt asked for only $8 and a one-year subscription to the Biblioasis-owned literary journal Canadian Notes & Queries.

On boingboing.net, designer Larry Knox breaks down the process of creating a cover for The Iliad, which he did right in his own living room. Knox fashioned a spear out of clay and a wooden dowel rod and took pictures of himself in warrior poses.

A link at the bottom of the article lets you see the photo shoot and separates the other pictures he used to compile the final cover.

(To read more about book design, be sure to check out Q&Q’s special report in our April issue, on stands now.)

The National Post reports that Canadian romance giant Harlequin is having a hard time finding suitable cover models. So much so that they’re holding a public audition in Toronto this weekend – and spindly, sallow professional models need not apply. Post reporter Ian Munroe writes that the firm is sick of “modelling agencies that supply them with thin, boyish-looking camera fodder,” and wants a more macho look. “It’s become a huge problem for us,” says Harlequin designer Deborah Peterson.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, this thin and boyish-looking Quillblogite must go pump some weights.

The April 2007 issue of Quill & Quire will appear in stores and in subscribers’ mailboxes over the next week or so. It includes a profile of Toronto novelist Cordelia Strube, a Special Report on Book Design, the Kids’ Announcements (listing all Canadian children’s books to be published this spring), and more. Plus our feature on Simon & Schuster Canada’s plans to boost their presence in the Canadian market.

Learn more about the issue after the jump, and go here for subscription information.

(more…)

Stephen King is the U.K.’s favourite guilty pleasure read, as reported in The Guardian. In a survey conducted for the Costa Book Awards 2006, King topped a list that included J.K. Rowling, John Grisham, and Dan Brown (the latter two tied).

The article includes a quote from Simon Trewin, a contributing author to The Encyclopaedia of Guilty Pleasures: 1001 Things You Hate to Love, noting that in general we prefer to read a book in public “that makes us look good.” And Quillblog noticed that Guardian reporter Peter Bradshaw’s own blog included a New Year’s resolution to finish reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and a future goal of tackling Hermann Broch.

But if guilty reading pleasures are ruling the day, perhaps it’s Bradshaw who will need to mask his high-brow literary tastes with the faux book covers Costa provided for download.

And her reading list is a little racier than her husband’s. The Washington Post’s Tamara Jones spoke with the American first lady about books, in honour of the upcoming National Book Festival.

Bush had some infinitely quotable things to say: “I will admit to reading books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover in high school, where you had a fake cover on the outside of the book and read it during math.”

Bush “breezily” admitted to having read “steamier” books since then, but avoided naming titles. She even turned to the librarian of Congress and said, “It’s hard even having to name ones that are steamy, don’t you think, Dr. Billington?”

No doubt someone with access to the White House library will be going through the collection, shelf by shelf, keeping a keen eye out for “fake covers” on Bush’s bodice-rippers.

Related links:
Read Jones’ interview with Bush here

Lionel Shriver, the author of the novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, is apparently publishing a new novel soon — and she isn’t too thrilled with the cover design process. In an arts column for The Guardian, Shriver writes: “Maybe 13 really is unlucky — since that’s the number of cover designs for my new novel that my publisher has already run through, and not one of them works.” Shriver is strangely fixated on the idea that her cover must bear an original illustration — no stock photography for her — and she seems a little fuzzy on the distinction between designer and illustrator, expressing bafflement that her publisher’s designers haven’t simply sat down and whipped off some drawings themselves.

As if to illustrate how much subjective personal preferences play into this kind of thing, Shriver points approvingly to the cover of one of her earlier books: “My first novel used Henri Rousseau’s The Dream, into which the heads of my characters were carefully hand-painted, in the same style, peeking through the foliage.” Which serves as an always-welcome reminder that one person’s kitsch-alarm igniter is another’s clever vision.

Not to worry, though — in the end, Shriver sat down with pencil crayons and did the job herself. “I drew my own damn book cover — luminous, one-of-a-kind, and, like one of Tolstoy’s real beauties, not quite perfect. We’ll see if my publisher bites.” Quillblog would love to eavesdrop on that meeting.

Weirdly, in the same column Shriver abruptly switches gears to take on — drumroll please — the aesthetic bankruptcy of free jazz. No word yet on whether she’s presented Ornette Coleman with a few tips on how to play the sax.

Related links:
Click here for the Lionel Shriver column

In this week’s episode of “Meet Your Meat,” HarperCollins saves a photogenic porcine pin-up from his fate at the end of an axe. Boonkinja links to an NBC story about HarperCollins’ search for a fresh cover model for their new edition of the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web, which led to a Tennessee farm and a picture-perfect piggy named – of course – Wilbur. “That little pig was irresistible,” said Maria Modugno, a vice-president with HarperCollins. “The pig leapt off the page.”

But then they learned that their cover-pig was destined for the dinner table – as if he had other, more important piggly places to be. “This pig is headed for pork chops, which is a little bit horrifying,” said Modugno. Pleas for the porker’s life were sent Farmer John’s way, and even his wife got in on the act, saying, “John, you know in the book, the farmer was not the good guy.” Poor Farmer John caved into his guilt: “I’m not going to be the bad old farmer, I’m going to be the good farmer.”

So the pig gets to live happily ever after, Farmer John is out some money, and we’ll bet that the Wilbur advocates will continue to tuck into nice plates of bacon and porkchops for the rest of their days, while smiling about that cute wee piglet they helped save once.

Related links:
Read the NBC article here

The Guardian site has the story of a survey of 500 men on “novels that changed their lives.” First, the good news: Fight Club is nowhere to be found on the list, so In Other Media need not be completely ashamed of his gender today. The bad news: one of the researchers notes with surprise “the firmness with which many men said that fiction didn’t speak to them.”

The books that did speak to the pollees were heavy on isolation and alienation (which, if In Other Media remembers correctly, was actually the name of a first-year undergrad course back in the day), with Camus’s The Outsider, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment topping the list at first, second, and third, respectively.

Since the researchers undertook a similar study involving female readers last year, the new results allow for much comparing and contrasting. “On the whole, men preferred books by dead white men,” reads the story, while women made “much richer and more diverse” choices that also included “a much broader mix between contemporary and classic works and between male and female authors.”

Interestingly, the differences even seemed to extend to format. “The researchers also found that women preferred old, well-thumbed paperbacks, whereas men had a slight fixation with the stiff covers of hardback books.”

Related links:
Click here for the Guardian story on the male-reading-habits survey

The CBC Arts website features a multifaceted look at marketing adult fiction to teen audiences. Although, through high school English classes and extracurricular reading, young adults have long been reading adult books, the inadvertent youth appeal of novels like Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and Lori Lansens’ The Girls recently has some publishers repositioning books by marketing them to younger audiences, issuing editions with youth-friendly covers, and adding them to their kids and/or YA catalogues. Even booksellers like the Grant Park location of McNally Robinson in Winnipeg are getting into the act. Showing an understanding of young adult readers, who’d often rather their fellow browsers be adults than the kids who populate more traditional young readers sections, the store offers YA books in two separate sections: one downstairs, near the adult fiction section, and one upstairs.

Related links:
Click here for the piece on the CBC Arts website
Click here for a February 2005 Q&Q feature on adult/YA crossover

So far as Valentine’s Day is concerned, there are two kinds of people: those who revel in prepackaged tokens of love and those for whom such tokens elicit the response of retching. Regardless of what camp one falls into, one thing is certain: stores are currently brimming with cherubs and chocolates and hearts. And according to Bookslut’s Melissa Fischer, even book covers aren’t immune to the seasonal onslaught of red-hued crass commercialism. In the litblog’s February issue, Fischer takes stock of some seasonal offerings, visually critiquing each one. Some of the featured titles include a couples workbook with bold, utilitarian design; a collection of dark short stories more appropriate for those who love Halloween; and an anthology of poetry for loners by the likes of Pablo Neruda and William Carlos Williams called The Hell With Love: Poems to Mend a Broken Heart. This last book’s cover image features four conversation candy hearts, each bearing a word from the book’s title.

Related links:
Click here for Melissa Fischer’s Bookslut piece

An article posted on the Toronto Star website today profiles the Dog Lovers Bookshop, an online bookseller carrying new and used books on all subjects canine. Formerly a bricks-and-mortar store, the business is co-owned by New Yorkers Bern Marcowitz and Margot Rosenberg, who used the experience they gained with their store to write a book repair manual, 2002’s The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New. Ever wonder how to get pesky stickers off the covers of your books? Or how to repair a torn dust jacket? Marcowitz, who is in Toronto today to present at the Ontario Library Association Super Conference on the topic of book care, provides answers to these and other questions in the article’s sidebar.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from the Toronto Star
Click here for the Dog Lovers Bookshop website

There’s been a lot of book-biz chatter about the chick-lit genre in the past few years, but in a column on the Book Standard site, Jessa Crispin takes on a male analogue: “the emo boy novel.”

Writes Crispin: “It’s making an entire generation of men’s writing look bad. I suppose it may be fair, as we women have to fight through the jungle of chick lit every day to publish our novels. But I’m begging for publishers to at least ghettoize emo-boy lit, maybe with color coordination and a design trick like our own high-heels-and-feet covers, before I have to start disregarding every book written by a man between the ages of 20 and 35.”

And how can you can tell you’re reading emo-boy lit? “Just open up to any random page and see if you can find a reference to any band mentioned on Pitchforkmedia.com in the last two years. Better yet, just look at the epigraph. If it’s from Death Cab for Cutie, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Bright Eyes or any other band of any kind, it’s an emo boy at work. Still not sure? Flip back to the author photo. Look like the underweight guy in high school who only talked to the girls and wrote out lyrics in his notebook during gym? Does he have perfectly ungroomed stubble? Emo boy.”

Mind you, the argument might be a bit stronger if Crispin actually identified more than a single novel (Andy Greenwald’s Miss Misery, published by Simon & Schuster) in this “ubiquitous” trend.

Related links:
Click here for Jessa Crispin’s Book Standard column

A story by Helen Rumbelow in The Times uses a lot of expert opinion to confirm what book business professionals have suspected for a long time: that in the increasingly crowded shelves of bookstores, a good cover design is more important for clinching a sale than positive reviews and media coverage. Rumbelow argues that since many book purchases are impulse buys, consumers are likely to consider buying a book with a cover that both catches their eye and appeals to their sensibilities. One expert estimates that a book is perused by the consumer for an average of one and a half seconds, which doesn’t give the cover a lot of time to communicate the book’s worthiness. The article also looks at a number of authors whose backlists have been relaunched with new cover art, leading to a noticeable increase in sales.

Related links:
Read The Times article

The current issue of Fast Company magazine reports the story of Berrett-Koehler, a press with an innovative approach to publishing. Based in San Francisco, the 13-year-old publishing house operates on the principle of collaboration. In addition to full-time in-house editors, BK’s managing editor, Jeevan Sivasubramaniam, employs a small team of freelance readers guaranteed to hold differing views of a book, each of whom writes a report. Also, the author’s input on design and marketing is encouraged via an interactive blog. “For each new book, editors and designers will come up with several titles and cover options, posting them online. Authors love the result — a buffet of distinct type fonts, rejiggered subtitles, and contrasting color schemes that evolve as new comments are posted. To help inform authors’ marketing decisions, everyone at BK — from the senior editors to sales managers to, literally, Kathy in accounting — is invited to share his or her suggestions on the blog and elsewhere.”

BK has also hosted author retreats and conferences “where … writers come together to share ideas, suggest speaking opportunities, and offer advice and contacts for book tours,” as well as “a marketing workshop, where some 60 authors and key outsiders, such as booksellers, shared experiences.” The company is also known to cede to the requests of its authors, granting one permission to publish his book for free online and another his choice of three copy editors.

Although BK’s co-operative strategy lengthens the process of publishing books, the apparent results of BK’s approach may serve as evidence for the benefits of collaboration. Attracting to its roster such writers as David Korten and the author of the bestselling One Minute Manager series, BK saw a growth in revenue of 25% last year, to $7-million US, and is projected to grow another 50% in 2005, according to Fast Company’s Lucas Conley. Conley adds that the average BK author sells some 15,000 copies, 27% more than the American industry average.

Thanks to BookNinja.com for the link.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from Fast Company

An interview with British author A.L. Kennedy on the Huffington Post website lays to rest any illusions aspiring literary fiction writers may have about the life awaiting them should they ever get their work published. Kennedy is blunt and funny in her assessment of the writing life. On the state of publishing: “Fewer publishing houses concentrated in conglomerate hands trying to produce more books of less quality. No full time readers, no full time copy editors and therefore missed newcomers and piss-poor final presentation of texts on the shelves, silly covers, greedy and simple-minded bookshop chains, lunatic bidding wars designed to crush the spirit of unknown newcomers….”

And then there’s the glamorous life of the jet-setting novelist: “Endless community halls and libraries, immensely tiring tours of places that might be interesting if you ever got to see them, food you can’t eat, or never get, not enough sleep, crushing isolation, little or no chance of a cup of tea on the road, endless working to subsidise the writing.”

Related links:
Read the A.L. Kennedy interview

The Diviners — not the CanLit classic about Morag and her coming of age, but the upcoming novel by Rick Moody — is already getting a cover makeover. The cover that was used on advance galleys of the book, showing a victorious Conan the Barbarian-type, is being reworked. The original image is being downplayed, and is now depicted as being shown in a crowded movie theatre. As reported in The New York Times, publisher Little, Brown realized at BookExpo America in June that there were problems with its original choice. “I realized we were making a mistake,” Little, Brown’s Michael Pietsch tells the Times. “I saw a lot of people, particularly women, just turn away from the cover.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The New York Times

Hardcover or trade paper? Author Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, whose first novel, The Nettle Spinner, is being published by Goose Lane Editions this spring (following a short-story collection), brings a personal perspective to that age-old debate in an essay for the Bookninja site. In “Hardcover Logo: Confessions of a Trade Paper Original.” Kuitenbrouwer writes, “I propose that a brand new hardcover purchase has a seriousness to it. That its high price and strong architecture signal an earnestness, a solid worth, an implicit value that the consumer absolutely cannot do without, right now, and also that the book’s author is necessarily substantial.”

And as McClelland & Stewart’s Ellen Seligman tells Kuitenbrouwer, the economics can be favourable to hardcover. The margin on hardcovers is so much higher that it tends to more than offset any additional sales that trade paper may inspire. “Often a hardcover and a trade paperback original may end up selling the same amount, in which case there is less of a [financial] return on trade paperbacks,” says Seligman.

Related links:
Click here for Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s Bookninja essay

It’s Bookermania over in Britain: Tuesday’s shortlist announcement has the press abuzz. The early favourite to win the prize appears to be David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (which is published here by Vintage Canada); a William Hill bookmaker told Reuters that the novel is “the hottest Booker Prize favourite that we have ever had.”

In other Booker news, The Guardian looks at some of the lucky shortlisted authors, while The Independent highlights some of the judges’ comments about the books they loved and loathed. (No names named in the latter category, alas.)

Finally, earlier this month The Telegraph filed a story about some deceptive marketing, by which publishers slap a deceptive “winner of the Booker Prize” tagline on newer and arguably less accomplished novels by past Booker winners. Says Rowan Pelling, one of this year’s judges: “I think it is massively misleading if this isn’t clarified on a book as it could lead to real bafflement on the reader’s part. It would be good if the industry could regulate this practice in a better way. Book covers in every aspect should be clearer.”

Related links:
Reuters story on Booker oddsmaking
The Guardian’s story on the Booker shortlist
The Independent’s story on the Booker shortlist
The Telegraph on the “winner of the Booker Prize” controversy
Q&Q Omni’s award news page, with item on sourcing this year’s Booker shortlist