Covers and the Poetics of Communication

Shigehisa Kuriyama

Do covers still have a place in our digital age?

The physical book has proved more resilient than champions of electronic texts once predicted, but the overall trend is plain: with each passing year we are reading less from printed paper and more on phones, tablets, e-book readers, and computers. Whence my question: Do covers still have a place when the publications that they previously covered are becoming nothing more than digital bits?

The Disappearance of Covers

In theory, one could suppose that not much would change. Yes, as books cease to be physical objects, covers are obviously no longer needed to protect them. But digital books could easily still sport a digitally reproduced cover. Indeed, given how recent phones and tablets enable zoomed scrutiny of images, it wouldn’t have been surprising, even, if the shift away from physical books had led to enhanced interest in covers.

But it hasn’t. On the contrary: in the transition to digital reading, covers are disappearing from view. On my Kindle, book covers survive only as small thumbnail icons, used as buttons to select a title for reading. Once a selection is made, I am plunged straight into the text, without ever seeing a full-screen reproduction of the cover. I can call up a full-screen view, to be sure, but I have to look for it, and this makes it entirely different from the cover of a physical book. Instead of a face that I see, naturally and inevitably, each time that I take a work in hand, the full-screen cover on the Kindle is a special option, a normally hidden facet that has to be actively sought out

The digital covers of academic journals are even harder to find. Consider the case of East Asian Science, Technology, and Society (EASTS), a journal whose editors clearly care about expressive cover design. Those who browse the journal through Project Muse can, to be sure, call up full-screen reproductions of issue covers from the last nine years. But again, readers have to consciously seek out these views (calling them up requires clicking on a thumbnail icon), and the covers from the first four years (2007-2010) aren’t archived online at all. Still more critically, Project Muse isn’t the only, or even necessarily the main way in which researchers will search online for EASTS articles.

At Harvard, for instance, the default library search for EASTS goes through ProQuest, which calls up the table of contents of each issue, but reproduces no cover images at all, not even thumbnails. The same holds true if one is searching—in by far the most common situation—for a particular article. The Harvard engine will quickly track it down in EASTS (if that it is where it appeared), but will again offer no way to see the cover of the issue in it which it appeared—and indeed, no hint that a cover ever existed. Quietly and completely, in the transition to digital access, the expressive covers of EASTS have vanished, without a trace.

Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover

Does the vanishing of journal covers matter?

A good number of people must feel that it doesn’t—or it wouldn’t have happened. After all, nothing about the technology of digital reading requires covers to disappear. It wouldn’t have been hard to program search engines and journal aggregators to keep them visible, and the possibilities of digital enhancement could easily have been deployed, on the contrary, to increase their allure. If covers have vanished, it is because they have been allowed to vanish—because the architects of online access judged them inessential, and because readers have acquiesced by not protesting, or perhaps, not even noticing.

The truth is that attractive covers have always been eyed with some ambivalence. They are like attractive faces: we are immediately drawn to them, but the very immediacy of their appeal makes them slightly suspect. After all, why should we be moved to pick up a book or approach a stranger before we have even read a page or exchanged a single word? We are wary: experience has taught us that appearances can deceive. We know that people with beautiful faces are sometimes morally ugly, and that an enticing cover can adorn a dull and turgid monograph. Whence the proverbial admonitions: “Don’t judge people by their looks,” and its parallel, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Surface is not substance. What matters is not the container but the content. Not the face but the soul. Not the cover but the text.

For those who think thus, the vanishing of covers is no great loss.

Why Covers Matter

But the idea of covers as mere surface is itself too superficial. Properly to assess the stakes in their loss, we must consider what covers do. And what they don’t.

What they don’t do is what articles do, and that is strive to mirror as faithfully as possible the thoughts in the minds of authors. The photograph below is typical of the kind of plate that is regularly found within articles. An author discussing steam locomotives, say, might include it to insure that readers envision exactly the model that she has in mind.

The photograph featured on the cover of a 2015 issue of EASTS (Vol. 9, No. 3) does something quite different. A discarded bed, a rusting train on a half-buried track—the objects that we see in this scene gesture unmistakably toward something beyond themselves, whispering to us of a life that once was but is no more, forgotten ghosts. Instead of circumscribing the imagination to specify the appearance of a particular object or individual, this cover image urges us to dream—to speculate about the story behind scene, and to wonder how this story relates to the studies inside the issue.

This is what covers do: they pose riddles and prompt the search for meanings. On the cover of this 2017 issue of EASTS (Vol. 11, No. 3) we see shadowy, megacephalic spirits, floating plants, and Bosch-like walking eggs. It is a mysterious image, and the caption inside only adds to the its enigmatic allusiveness: the picture, we are told, incorporates negatives of the artist’s own body and an MRI scan of her brain, and belongs to a series called Clinical Path of the Sphinx. What do these elements have to do with articles on stem cells and bottled water, cultural psychology and scientific thought? We open the journal expectantly, curious, engaged.

It is this emphasis on engagement that is lost with the vanishing of covers. And that is why their vanishing matters.

The cover is the one aspect of a journal issue that is intently focused on readers rather than authors. If we often find journal covers more engaging and poetic than the academic articles within, it is because they are deliberately designed to engage, because they approach us as poets (from Greek, poein, “to make”), as co-creators of meaning, as creative partners in communication. Instead of treating us as passive listeners to a monologue, they address us as active participants in a dialogue. Covers intimate that the facts and ideas articulated by the authors are only part of a greater web of unspoken meanings and not-yet-noticed connections—that communication is, in the end, an open-ended riddle that each reader must solve in her own way.

With the help of some shrewdly chosen clues: like a rusting train, or walking eggs—or a woodprint of an increasingly electrified world.

One train has arrived and is disgorging its passengers. But the more important train is the invisible one that has yet to come, the future that the young woman awaits.

Will something come to replace the covers that are disappearing in the transition to digital reading? In form, the replacements are arguably here: the header images and videos that introduce many websites and online narratives already function very much like the covers of pre-digital books. Articles in academic journals have thus far been slow to incorporate them—no doubt in part because of the lingering priority of the printed page in many fields. But as natively digital publications gradually gain ground in academia, we may well start to see covers reborn as article headers.

I hope so. Such a change, if it happens, could be unexpectedly transformative. For almost certainly, authors would be much more active in designing the headers for their own articles than they currently are in the selection of book and journal covers. Which means that scholars would start to focus more on the interplay between explicit explanation and riddling reflection, between what they wish to say and what they hope readers will imagine and take away. On the poetics of communication.