Why book cover ideas are a great insight into various epochs.

The way that we decorate our books informs us a lot about how people have regarded them through the ages.

The books that firms like the hedge fund that owns Waterstones and the association that backs Bookshop.org understand today are items of the Victorian age. The industrial revolution altered everything, forming institutionalised services in every sector of society, bookselling and marketing included. For the first time in history, artists were hired to figure out what makes a good book cover, decorating beautiful fabric book covers with the most trendy creative styles of the day, such as art décor. It was also at this time that the paperback was born, costing simply a penny in train stations and ominously referred to as the 'Penny Dreadful'. This marked the introduction of marketing in the world of bookselling, where the art on the front of a book is expected to catch the eye of its designated audience, a concept that was rather unfamiliar due to the fact that the large majority (around 90%) of people could read for the very first time in human history. In preceding centuries when just a tiny segment of the upper classes could read, books would be bought covered in paper with a momentary seam from the printer's and then taken to a specialist book binder to be embellished with as extravagant a design as the consumer could pay for. This normally implied leather covers engraved with their name or some detailed design.

Over the last half a millennium or so, books have actually been fairly available thanks to the printing press, a really revolutionary creation which occurred at the end of the fifteenth century. Before that, books were a treasure of the highest degree. As the West sunk from the height of ancient civilisation into the barbarism of the Middle Ages, books were an unusual commodity, kept alive by the small fraction of people that might read-- monks. Spending their lives painstakingly copying out the books of antiquity by hand, the works were secured with the highest respect. They were gilded in the finest and most luxurious book cover designs in history; engraved ivory, gold and silver seams, shimmering gemstones; absolutely nothing was too costly for the greatest treasure that mankind would ever have-- knowledge.

A person could be forgiven for imagining that books constantly looked basically the same as they do today, with a couple of visual differences naturally. Although books are a two-thousand-year-old technology that still survives, bringing home entertainment and inspiration to millions are the world every day, and lining the shelves of countless homes with their beautiful book cover designs, their place within our society has changed tremendously, something that is shown in how they look. As books have changed, so too have those stunning covers. It is more than a matter of evolving artistic styles or the products readily available to publishers; book covers have always mirrored the place of the book within society, a visual reflection of who can read and how those individuals felt about the object, from the monks of medieval Europe to internet sellers like the impact investor with a stake in World of Books right now.

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