PICTORIAL COVERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19780, 29 October 1927, Page 7 (Supplement)

PICTORIAL COVERS.

THE QUESTION OF VALUE.

Does the pictorial cover, known in the book trade as the jacket, which publishers put on the novels they issue, help to sell their books ? Tho original purpose of the jacket was to protect the cloth binding from becoming soiled while the book was handled in the course of trade, or while lying on tho bookseller's counter; and the present use of /it as a pictorial representation of a more or less thrilling scene in the book is a later development.

Undoubtedly, says a recent writer, publishers believe that an attractive design on a jacket does help to sell a book, and for that reason they are competing with one another in attractive designs. Probably the display of a scries of attractive covers of books on a railway bookstall does influence a traveller who has a long journey in front of him, but only a reader with a superficial knowledge of current, literature would buy a book because & its cover design. The sophisticated reader is more likely to buy a book by an author with whose previous work he is familiar, than one by art unknown write! with a striking picturo on the iacket. Moreover, the crude sensationalism of many of the designs is more likely to repel than to attract a sophisticated reader. Sir Walter Raleigh, not the Elizabethan Sir Walter, but a distinguished English scholar, who was professor of English literature at Oxford until his death two years ago, in recommending that newspapers should publish at the head of each article a photograph of the writer, in order to enable people to decide whether the article was or was not worth reading, said, "I have been saved from .many bad novels by the helpful pictorial advertisements of modern publishers."