THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE COVER
Jhumpa Lahiri's Italian foray into what books wear is a lightning read loaded with meaning.
During this short stay in New York area, I’ve hardly had time to read even though I’ve been surrounded by books. My daughter and son are book collectors—and readers, too, through the decades—and my daughter is now my self-appointed guide to the terrific bookstores of Brooklyn.
A couple of days ago, the tiniest blue book caught my eye at McNally Jackson Books, a store I love so much for its curation by the world’s regions. The book is a meditation on the look of a book. In The Clothing of Books, author Jhumpa Lahiri writes about book covers and our obsession with them and ponders the meaning of a cover. This work in Italian emerged from a lecture she was asked to deliver about writing and she decided to focus on the significance of book jackets and covers.
She begins her essay with something people from India can appreciate. She reflects on what it means for students to have to wear school uniforms in the cities across India. When she visited her cousins in Calcutta (Kolkata), she would think about how her cousins wore their school’s chosen uniforms without a care at all about the effect of their clothes on their school mates. Theirs was a stress-free sartorial environment, whereas Jhumpa’s own predicament back in the United States was radically different. In an environment where school uniforms were not a thing, what a student wore changed her experience in school. Jhumpa writes that she felt judged by her classmates. She stood out because of what her mother made her wear.
Lahiri also reflects on the busy book jackets of current times and tells us how so often today we judge a book by its cover. She takes us back into the past when books were often “naked” and plain, when all we knew was the name of the book and the author and we’d discover the contents simply by the exercise of reading. The passage below describes a world that was mine in the seventies when I was growing up and discovering the world of books.
Lahiri, who has been translated into several dozen languages, conveys the emotions related to the covers of her books. She reflects on how the covers of one of her books in many different world languages look very different, even though the content is exactly the same, making us wonder about how cultural connotations are singular to the making of a book.
No matter how many books we’ve written, the excitement of seeing the cover of one’s own book is something that I could identify with. I could also understand the other emotion, that of disappointment, upon seeing a cover. The cover of one of my books thrilled me; that of the other did nothing for me because it didn’t convey the spirit of my work. This is a brief post despite how thoughtful Lahiri’s essay is, I’m afraid. I hope you understand I must go. I’m in New York.
In one of the books I ghostwrote, there was a late-stage negotiation about whether or not my name would appear on the cover (By So-and-So, with Peter Moore). I told them I needed an extra $50k if they anonymized my contribution. And they gave it to me! Shows how important not-giving-a-damn-whether-you-get-the-gig is to a contract negotiation.