Most book covers are terrible. Most book design is terrible. It’s terrible in that it’s over-designed. Too many words trying to describe, capture, sell what’s inside. Too many overly literal cover images. Too much goddamned art. Are there instances of visually complex covers that successfully complement the book? Absolutely. But in my more curmudgeonly moments, when I see covers for books that I like, I think they would have looked better had they looked plainer. They would look better if they’d had the cover removed, if they were left with the stark honesty of the title page. Honestly, I like the example established by French publisher Gallimard. Plain cover, title, genre, publisher, author name. Leave everything else off. I am compromising by allowing any genre indications. Everyone’s life would be more interesting if readers were forced to figure out the genre themselves. There is too much overt, aggressive, front-end explanation and style categorization of art these days. 

And I hate blurbs. They are marketing copy coerced from the author’s friends and acquaintances. Or (if one is extremely lucky) they are quotations from reviews pulled out of context. The blurb forces writers to become ad copywriters, and I don’t know if it’s lack of skill or resentment at the unpaid labor, but the blurbs aren’t any good. They fail as description of the work contained inside, and they fail as provocative enticements to read the work inside. And they turn writers of literature (briefly discarding the quotation marks that typically shackle that word) into harvesters of clichés. It’s worse than a grade school awards ceremony, because we are all adults and theoretically should know better. Do blurbs even work? Has there been one reader pulled in by the canned hyperbole of some secondary author? It seems like by now there should be some data on this question. 

And no, I don’t like author photographs either. And I think the downfall of American literary journals is tied to when they, collectively, began including author photographs alongside their essays and poems and such. What is this, high school? Facebook? Have a little pride. America, let your writers be ugly and at peace!

And since I’m being thorough here: I also hate contributor’s notes in literary journals that list anything more than where the author is from and if they have an interesting job. (No one has interesting jobs anymore. They all teach.) The contributors’ notes now are so bloated they read like a more insufferable version of LinkedIn. If the blurbs are a kind of inter-personal logrolling, the contributors’ notes are a kind of institutional logrolling. I realize that logrolling occurs. I’m not that much of a Pollyanna. But I just wish it wasn’t so glaringly obvious, boring, and poorly written. Not even your mother cares about all those awards!

Are there exceptions? Sure. The black-and-white, windswept-yet-embalmed, deb-in-heat photos of Marion Ettlinger are, of course, provocative, making even the most agoraphobic sweater-covered humanoid temporarily alluring. The Vintage Contemporaries series from the 80s was wonderful, bright, surreal, associative covers that are instantly recognizable. And yes, I think Chip Kidd and Peter Mendelsund are brilliant. They’re great, but they can’t design everything. 

Really what I want is the covers of John McPhee. He’s written 40-ish books, and the majority of them have been published in paperback editions by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and they all look the same. I love the stark uniformity of all these McPhee titles, even more so because the topics he covers in his somehow non-boring nonfiction is so sui generis. Rural inbred pine tree people living in the inner wilds of New Jersey? The smuggling of Russian paintings? The historical attempts to control the Mississippi River? If you line up all your McPhee titles on the shelf, they are wearing their uniform, unassuming, diligent, neat, immediately identifiable. Yes, I know the front covers typically have some kind of art smear that hint at the thematic contents inside. Don’t be pedantic and ruin my point. These books look good and they look like they belong together. 

I realize that if all the new books adopted a McPhee-like minimalist approach and paranoia regarding graphic design change, the world would grow that much plainer, without all that shouting cleavage everywhere. Perhaps I would grow bored when I entered the bookstore. But I’m willing to give it a try. Someone somewhere figured out a visual language for McPhee and stuck with it through the decades. 

I should further confess that I prefer paperback editions to their more stately hardback older brothers. I find the hardbacks too nice, trying too hard to be museum quality. I have a love-hate relationship with the dust jacket. With my purported attraction to plainness, one would think I would simply throw the cover away, and yet I can’t do it. Chip Kidd once described his dust jacket work as designing grocery bags — a temporary container that’s destined to be discarded. I can’t decide if this self-evaluation is mature or nihilistic, or both. I also resent the time window variations between the hardback and the paperback editions. I realize this is a historical legacy of publishing, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and what I want, apparently, is for all books to publish first run as a mid-90s era Vintage International paperbacks. Matte cover, usually abstract, trade paperback width, paper quality just this side of feeling cheap. I never got on with mass market paperbacks, though I like the ideology. They’re too thick to hold comfortably, and there’s not enough margin to write down comments, and I am still trying to make a decent grade. I realize that by discovering my latent favorite what I might be asking for above all is to be young again. You know: back when they did things better. 

Currently, here in the Middle Ages, Fitzcarraldo Editions is close to my idea of perfection, one color for nonfiction titles, another for fiction titles. It’s simple and calming, and all of your books from that publisher can wink at each other smugly from the shelves.

But whatever you do, book designers of the future: no deckled edges.