Books + Covers + Judging = Well-known phrase

I'm just going to go ahead and say it: I'm a sucker for good ("good" obviously being entirely subjective) design. Hold up. Not just good design. I'm a sucker for clever design. For design that has been thought-out with its intended audience firmly in mind. For design that is unabashedly there as a marketing ploy, whether it is an idea that's being sold, a message, a product, a service.

The best illustration of this that I can think of can be found in my book-buying behaviour.

I believe I'm on the verge of a bank-destroying book-buying binge.  Emails confirming the dispatch of goods bought are popping up in my inbox. Padded envelopes have started appearing on my frontdoor mat. And after the initial cheeky grin that accompanies the opening of the envelope, which is swiftly chased by surprise at the book that's now in my hands ("I do not remember ordering this. Someone's sending me books through the post in a passive-aggressive manner, surely? I've obviously picked up the world's nicest stalker!"), an inevitable sinking feeling hits as I remember the night three days before that found me entering my card details for this object. Do I really need this edition of Romeo and Juliet, which was bought purely because the design included laser-cut images of key scenes? What precisely am I going to do with a copy of 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design? On which Sunday afternoon am I actually going to sit down and read Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda, and Art? This isn't healthy, surely?

My bookcase has actually become unusable, with books haphazardly stacked in front of and on top of books. I'm not entirely sure of the contents of the case anymore, and any attempt to mine a particular vein will undoubtedly result in a collapse of horrific proportions. And I'm not ready to be crushed by a pile of books of which the majority have not even been read yet.

They're obviously organised using the standard Dewey Decimal Classification system.

There's a deeper issue at stake here, to do with buying physical books to simply own them, and the comfort of having your books around you as a projection of who you are, what your interests are, what you want your interests to be. I'm sure this is how Nick Hornby's protagonist Rob feels in High Fidelity, surrounded by his categorised vinyl records.

But the reason I'm mentioning this behaviour is that, because I can now recognise the beginnings of a binge, I have determined to avoid all book shops for the near future. I know that if I find myself making my way into one of these havens of temptation whilst in the grips of my fever, I will inevitably be making a furtive exit half an hour later, with a heavy bag accompanying me. In that bag will be books that I either already own but have now bought in a well-designed edition, and/or books that I have never heard of and had no intention of buying, bar from the fact I was drawn to them by their cover and then convinced by the blurb that they are books that I should own and read.

And this is the crux of it: I reckon you can judge a book by its cover (and here's an article from 2011 agreeing with me; hooray for validation). Those covers have been designed with a set audience in mind. There's a language of book covers, just as there's a language of film posters. In the colours chosen, the fonts, the imagery, the publishers are saying that the contents will appeal to a particular demographic. The dozens of copy-cats that emerged after the success of Fifty Shades of Grey all had a *very* familiar style to their jackets. Those adventure books, fantasy series, romantic stories, all of them use a very particular design vocabulary to communicate their genre in a blink of an eye to those that speak the language.

So, here's to the artists who so callously lure us in with their limited edition covers for books we already own. Here's to the publishers such as Foyles who provide heavily bounded books at a purse-busting price. And here's to those bibliophiles who will continue to binge buy their books, no matter the Kindle that is our more common travel companion.