Open me up.

A table of books gets my pulse going even if I’m not looking for something to read: bubble lettering, battalions of embossed gothic type, the nostalgic swoop of cursive. Mournfully erotic body parts, giant eyes, misty beaches suggesting some distant childhood memory. Honey! Hey! Over here! Open me up! Put your fingers on my spine, I’m everything you’ve ever wanted from a story…

I love the bleak yet playful simplicity of Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz and the menacing pop-art of Penguin’s re-issue of Dahl’s Kiss Kiss. Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes gives me goose bumps and Clara Sanchez’s The Scent of Lemon Leaves is dreamily enticing, nudging you to follow the girl into her story. My friend Emily, a journalist for The Spectator who also runs my local bookstore, has watched covers become increasing brilliant over the last five years: “there’s no doubt, we’re in a different league now,” she told me yesterday as we analyzed the typography and colors of different genres in her bookshop. With the increasing threat from ebooks, the covers of paper books are not only advertisements for their content but an integral part of why people buy physical books. I bought Kiss Kiss, for example, despite already owning an older edition of the stories. If the book isn’t stunning, why not just download the text?

It makes me smile that Suzanne Dean ordered vintage watches from eBay and smashed them in her garden while coming up with draft cover of  The Sense of an Ending. I want to eat every draft of Henry Yee’s designs for Alan Bennett’s Smut and shake hands with whoever designs Murakami books. I have a knee-melting crush on Jon Gray, who designs Jonathan Safran Foer’s typographical covers and the aforementioned Kiss Kiss. And I adore the simplicity of covers such as those of innovative publishing house &OtherStories, who are emulating the visual unity of publishing houses like as Diogones (who did this with The Pink Hotel).

This surge of great design a good thing for authors, who in general have little control over the look and placing of their books. On seeing the cover for my first novel, Isabel and Rocco, I sat speechless at my desk. I thought it was good, but it was so odd seeing my mountain of words translated into a single, sellable image. (The publisher sent me three nearly identical “choices” of a girl removing her top, revealing varying degrees of nipple in the process, so my only input on that cover was nipple-related: I went for “just a hint”). Then I was in Damascus at a sticky Internet café for the first draft cover ideas for The Pink Hotel and because of the Internet connection, they wouldn’t download properly. All I could see were strange pixilated bubbles of pale pink on the fuzzy screen and for two weeks of traveling around Syria and Jordan I had recurring nightmares about jaunty candy floss colors before returning home and seeing that the cover was in fact cleverly desolate.

Excitingly and scarily, I received a draft front cover of my third novel last week. It’s called The Art of Leaving. I won’t post the cover because it’s only a draft and everything might change, but I think I quite like it…