posted on 07 May 2019

The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri

This is another in the series of delightful pocket-sized individual essays that are perfect for a short train journey or a quiet hour when you need a reading-for-relaxation break. This one is published by Bloomsbury in an impossibly tasteful card cover in a sort of very pale mint or greeny grey livery with the title embossed on front in gold and the authors name in white.

I’m making an issue of its presentation because that’s exactly what this short essay is all about – the way books are presented.  The sixty or so pages are an adaptation of a speech given by Lahiri in Italy in 2015 where the author now lives – she has in fact, just last year, published her first full length novel in Italian and now sees that country as home. She is probably more usefully thought of though as a citizen of the world because her Indian heritage and the fact that she was educated in the USA also shape both the content and nature of her writing.

What I especially liked about this little book was that it wasn’t just another author telling us about the history of the book jacket and how much they loved their favourite ones. Instead this is a quite intense personal view that springs from how her own book jackets do – or more often do not – satisfy her or come up to her expectations and why it’s so important to her that the jacket in some way is in sympathy, if not with the content of her books then with the moving spirit of her creations. Just to illustrate how visceral her response is to her own book jackets she speaks at one stage of physically recoiling in horror at one of her jackets and in another episode how, at book signings, she’s tempted to rip the cover off others.

She traces the strength of her feelings about the design of her book jackets to her insecurities about her own issues with clothing as a child. Because she didn’t have the security or anonymity of a school uniform and was teased at school for her choice of clothing, issues of (self) presentation are, for her, issues of personal identity. She has extended these deeply-rooted emotions to her adult creations – books – and has very clear ideas about what is and what isn’t acceptable to her.

I was really surprised to discover just how little control a successful author like Lahiri has over the jacket designs for her books. Once she has handed over the manuscript to a publisher it seems that the production process goes into  a kind of automated set of functions that result in her being emailed a version of the jacket over which she has only very limited ability to ask for change. Astonishingly, author and book jacket designer will often never speak to each other and the author won’t even know whether the designer has even read the book.

The process is remarkably corporate and this is best illustrated by this incident:

“Recently, in Italy, a peculiar thing happened: I was sent a complimentary book by an Italian publisher, and this book – the Italian edition of a novel written in English by a writer of Indian origin – has the same cover as the current American edition of my first book of short stories. It is identical in every detail.”

And this then is the bottom line: for publishers the jackets they put on books aren’t primarily about the cover as part of a unified artistic whole but are essentially a marketing tool. Of course, I know that to be true but quite how brutally it is implemented rather took me by surprise.

Not all the essay is critical of her own book jackets however. She talks about how collaboration with a photographer in the whole creative process produced a cover for her most recent book that she’s happy with and, as the child of a librarian, she also knows and understands the power of books and their jackets and the significance of books with no jackets. A hardback stripped of its identifying jacket and associated author details is a very different beast to one with all those attendant details. A naked book can only be known by reading it – but somehow the reading experience is a very different one in those circumstances.

I read this on a train from Birmingham to Malvern that was so packed that people could hardly lift their phones to their faces but it’s a tribute to how much I enjoyed it that I barely noticed the crush.

 

Terry Potter

May 2019