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What Kind of Ugly Should a Book Cover Be?
The new Europa all-in-one edition of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet is the wrong kind of garish.
In a day and age when book covers need to look good in order to be posted online, there are telltale signs of desperation in design: giant fonts, bright colors, gimmicks like sprayed edges. A number of book-cover tropes have set in as the publishing industry wobbles into an uncertain future: cartoony romance-novel covers, font-choice-as-design, an isolated part of a woman’s body abstracted to show she is complicated. There’s a reason why so many thrift stores are full of old Penguin editions of novels that have little beyond a title, author, and memorable logo: This is not overcomplicating things whatsoever, but rather making a book design straightforward, approachable, and clean.
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