Judging a book by its cover

By Cory Doctorow at 9:14 am Sunday, Mar 30

The Readerville book-cover reviews judge books by their cover. Genre writers spend a lot of time talking about covers, but it's never this highbrow -- it more frequently runs to, "Why the hell is there a badly-proportioned busty space-mercenary in an unzipped jumpsuit firing a laser on the cover of my damned book?"

There are a lot of obvious traps a designer could fall into designing a cover for John Szwed's So What: The Life of Miles Davis, but designer Massand Peploe avoids them all -- no faux retro jazz-cover styling, no hepcat winking design tricks. The simplicity of the concept could scarcely be improved upon. In reality, it's a little, um, jazzier than this scan reflects. The whole thing's glossy black and silver, like a darkened nightclub with a single spotlit musician. And what appears to be just a simple photo of one end of a trumpet actually wraps all the way around the spine to the back to reveal Miles himself on the other end. Simple, modern, low-key (but witty -- the lines get smaller and smaller, like notes fading away) typography underscores the final verdict on this one: it doesn't blow.

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