Can you judge a book by its cover

Our assessments of the content of each book based solely on the cover seem to be unerringly accurate. Justus Oehler thinks this is because he is fantastically clever, but in reality this is because every cover works flawlessly in transmitting basic messages about the genre and the approach of the novelist. None of these jackets could be described as “good design”. Or put another way, none of them has the ambition to be good, and certainly none of them succeeds. I would not vote for any of them if I was on a British Design & Art Direction jury. So they don’t look good, but they work. Why is this?

There is a dialogue between the reader and the designers. By designers I mean everyone who has a hand in the way the book finally looks, not just the person who places the type and crops the image, but the collective which is always involved in jackets: salesman, editor, and designer, and sometimes the author. Oehler and I felt that the designer was not primarily responsible for the image, or cover idea for several of the books in this selection. We felt this because they lacked graphic strength and character. No designer would ever look at the grey, poorly-composed painting of two men in a graveyard on the cover of The Deposition of Father McGreevy and think “That’s a picture I must use”. But although visually poor, it does contain elements that match motifs in the novel.

In the dialogue, a certain sort of taste is only part of the message. The dialogue is expressed in design elements; certain images, colours and typography that readers accept to represent different genres in fiction writing. Refined design sensibility becomes part of the positioning. It says, as much as a picture does, “I am right for the kind of person who will appreciate me”.

There are covers which are much more palatable to a designer; the German publisher Dtv until recently used exclusively Helvetica and a drawing for all its fiction, and the books sell. In the 1940s, Penguin used Gill Sans and the colour orange, without any further visual clues as to the content. There is no reason why any formula cannot be used to wrap a book, if the readers understand these messages. This understanding evolves: what works in Germany does not work here, what worked when Penguin was the only paperback publisher will not work now.

An average bookshop today contains 100 000 books, and each book must make itself understood without a moment’s hesitation. It has to fit itself into its genre or niche and find its buyer in a split-second. And if the publishers can do this without using careful kerning, or sophisticated aesthetic nous, what does it matter? n

The Booker Prize winner will be announced on 7 November.