Clever Book Covers

Forget what your Mom told you, that you can't judge a book by its cover. It might be good advice about people, but not when it comes to books.

After all, if you can't judge a book by its cover, then what good's the cover? Publishers spend countless dollars and hours annually creating interesting covers and titles. Their goal is twofold: to accurately represent the book's content and to entice you to buy.

We take a look at some recent books, to see if they're as good as their covers promise.

SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE

>>Soon I Will Be Invincible: by Austin Grossman ($22.95, Pantheon Books)

>>title and cover:

The perfect marriage of title and cover design for "Soon I Will Be Invincible" demonstrates just why Chip Kidd is one of the top designers in his field. The lettering of the title grows increasingly larger, the visual equivalent of a supervillain's threat, that last word, "Invincible," largest of all, as if ringing out triumphantly.

Kidd uses photographs for the cover, emphasizing the matter-of-factness with which superheroes and villains are treated in the novel. But the colors and images are also brightly colored and basic, as in a comic book world.

The cover image shows a red, winged helmet held high against a cobalt blue background. On the back cover: the blue hands and arms of a man donning blue gloves, the left hand clenched in a powerful fist. There's even an image on the book jacket's spine: two red hands holding a black mask against a green background.

And for the curious and adventurous readers, a reward: the actual cover of the book itself has a photograph of a pile of costumes for the super-powered, with the title and author's name written on a round belt buckle.

>>the book:

Broken down to its most basic elements, the plot of "I Shall Be Invincible" is a familiar one: villain wants to take over the world and builds a doomsday device, heroes fight him. But author Austin Grossman tells this story in a fresh and witty way, appealing not only to our adult intellect but entertaining the child within us as well.

The chapters' narrators alternate between bionic woman Fatale, and Doctor Impossible, the evil, genius scientist. Or, as he puts it, "I'm still the brilliant, the appalling, the diabolical Doctor Impossible, damn it. And yes, I am invincible."

Grossman gives his chapters titles such as: "Foiled Again," "My Master Plan Unfolds," "Save the World" and "At Last We Meet." When the story opens, Doctor Impossible's being held in the Special Confinement Unit of a special prison, forced to meet regularly with a therapist who asks questions such as, "Why did you want to control the world? Do you feel out of control?"

In Grossman's world, superheroes have publicists, do advertisements, agonize over whether they fit in and what name they should choose for themselves. It turns out adulthood, even for the superpowered, is just like high school: jocks and nerds uneasily occupying the same space.

According to the book jacket, Grossman's a video-game design consultant and also a doctoral candidate in English literature, specializing in Romantic and Victorian literature.

"I Shall Be Invincible" is a thoroughly fun read, every bit as smart and creative as its cover design.

THE TOURISTS

>>The Tourists: by Jeff Hobbs ($24, Simon & Schuster)

>>title and cover:

"The Tourists" has one of the more unusual covers I've seen in a while: two chairs having sex, well...chairstyle. Grooves in the carpet and an ashtray with a smoldering cigarette in the foreground suggest that the fooling around's been going on for a while. The background: a wall-to-ceiling office window with a night view of New York City.

The cover, by designer Michael Accordino, makes even more sense after you read the book: one of the characters is a famous industrial designer who specializes in chairs, and yes, there is an office tryst.

As for the title, Hobbs quotes Don DeLillo from "The Names," which says in part, "To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home."

>>the book:

Reading "The Tourists" was a frustrating enterprise, as I wanted to like it much more than I did. Unfortunately, the cover's more entertaining than the book itself.

Author Jeff Hobbs, a 2002 graduate of Yale, has written a book about four graduates from Yale; they've been out of college for eight years now, trying to make their way in the world. I found the characters' professions to be more exciting than the characters themselves: a freelance writer, a successful furniture/industrial designer, and the owner of a boutique textile printing company. (The fourth works at a start-up hedge fund.) The characters are pretty on the outside, ugly and empty on the inside.

Narcissistic and shallow, they're still reliving their college glory days when they should've moved on long ago. At times reading the novel is like sitting at a table of strangers reminiscing about their school days - maybe it matters to them, but you can't help wondering what the big deal is.

The book's plot revolves around a love triangle - or rectangle, or even pentagon - including a couple of straight men who sleep with other men and a gay man who suddenly romances a woman.

One reviewer compared "The Tourists" to "The Great Gatsby." Ludicrous. Hobbs has some good lines, but some sentences are so awkwardly constructed I had to reread them to decipher their meaning. (And the New Yorker in me cringed every time he had a character go north or west; no true New Yorker uses those terms in the city - it's always uptown/downtown or crosstown.)

Maybe when Hobbs gains more life experience and the perspective and depth that comes with maturity, he'll produce some knock-out books. But "The Tourists" isn't it.

...AND HIS LOVELY WIFE

>>...and His Lovely Wife: A Memoir From the Woman Beside the Man: by Connie Schultz ($24.95, Random House)

>>title and cover:

With its black, white and red cover, the front of "...and His Lovely Wife" could almost double as a White Stripes album cover. And at first glance, the design, by Karen Lau, seems almost conventional. But then you notice the man standing to the right of the author - Connie Schultz's husband, Senator Sherrod Brown. Well, at least that's who I think he is, as there's only a sliver of him showing. His face and any identifying features have been sliced off by the edge of the book.

Accompanying her husband during his campaign, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Connie Schultz was often just seen as a nameless spousal appendage to her husband, introduced merely as "his lovely wife."

I heard Schultz interviewed on NPR; she said woman always laugh when they hear the title, because they instantly get it. That was my reaction too.

>>the book:

When Ohio Congressman Sherrod Brown decides to run for the senate --though no Democrat had won a statewide office in a dozen years-- life changes drastically for his wife, Connie Schultz. Pultizer-Prize winning columnist for Cleveland's "The Plain Dealer," she soon realizes she has to take a leave of absence from the job she loves, in order not to give the appearance of a conflict of interest.

But, writers can't not write, so Schultz's notes and insights transform into "...and His Lovely Wife," a warm and revealing behind-thescenes look at life on the campaign trail.

She writes about men in suits trying to steal her family's garbage; campaign speeches, debates, and negative ads; and yes, about the countless times she was introduced as "his lovely wife." But this is no typical political book filled with puff and posturing. Schultz has a personable, straight-forward style. And as a journalist herself, she's uniquely qualified to judge the quality of political coverage in the media.

"...and His Lovely Wife" is also the story of a strong marriage of two people who found each other midlife and treasure their love.

Before the book was done, I was wishing I'd lived in Ohio so I could've voted for Connie Schultz's lovely husband. I also couldn't help but wish I shared an office with Schultz, so I could grab a cup of coffee with her and talk shop.

Also: "Life Happens" by Connie Schultz, a collection of her prize-winning column.

>>All Will Be Revealed: by Robert Anthony Siegel ($24, MacAdam Cage)

>>title and cover:

Sex sells. A naked woman lounges on the olive-tinted cover of "All Will Be Revealed," designed by Dorothy Carico Smith. Her eyes are closed; she's hiding in her own thoughts. The striped cloth she holds to her breasts is doing an inadequate job of covering her. It's an appropriate cover for the novel, as one of the main characters is a man who creates and sells pornographic pictures in the late 1800s.

The title is also apt, and playful, as it can be taken many different ways: as a promise of total nudity, or the total intimacy of two people in love. As the book also contains a spiritualist who speaks for the dead, the title could also refer to her: she will reveal the secrets of your heart, or of those who have passed on. Or, perhaps she'll be revealed as a fraud in the end.

The cover looks old-fashioned, while the sans-serif white lettering of the title and author give a modern feel to the book. It's a great visual reflection of Siegel's writing, which is also classic with a modern feel.

>>the book:

An Arctic explorer, a spiritualist who communicates for the dead, and a disabled man in a wheelchair who makes his fortune by making pornographic photographs are the main figures in this intriguing novel, set in the late 1880s. How do their unusual lives intersect and what will happen? Is the woman a fraud? As the title promises, all will be revealed.

Robert Anthony Siegel is a highly skilled writer, adept not only at plot and characterization, but at noticing and describing the tiny, important details of our lives. Siegel deftly weaves together the various characters and themes of his novel: the spiritual vs. the material, love vs. lust, manipulation and isolation in its myriad forms.

Reading Siegel's novel, I felt the way I did when watching the films "Perfume" or "Amelie": I didn't know where the story was going to go, but I was entertained and intrigued, and knew I was in the hands of a master storyteller. THE NEW YORKERS

>>The New Yorkers: by Cathleen Schine ($24, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

>>title and cover:

The cover of "The New Yorkers," designed by Charlotte Strick, may be simple, but it's certainly interesting: a dog's-level photograph of a white pit bull, with pink ears, eyelids and muzzle. Her owner's just a dark, insignificant blur of legs on the sidewalk behind her. The dog's staring directly at you, and it's hard to turn away.

Each time I picked up the book, I tried to decipher the dog's mood; what were her eyes saying?

Against the vast whiteness of the cover is the fanciful, fiesta-colored embossed title - colors the typical black-wearing New Yorker wouldn't be caught dead in.

Conventional wisdom says that images of kids or animals can sell anything, but in this case, the photo represents a major character in the book: an elderly, white pit bull mix named Beatrice.

>>the book:

People --and pets-- can steal your heart. And the characters in Cathleen Schine's "The New Yorkers," both human and canine, certainly do so. The action takes place on a street on the upper West Side in NYC, where people's lives intersect, thanks to dogs.

"The New Yorkers" is an enchanting love letter to dogs, to the changing seasons, to New York City, and to love itself. Dogs populate this incredible novel, both in the plot and in Leanne Shapton's exquisite line drawings which not only grace the beginning of each chapter but the text as well. Schine is a master at her craft, whether it's describing the adoring gaze of a dog and the warm weight of its head on your thigh, or the mysterious longings of a love not yet fully formed. This book portrays the wide varieties of love: romantic love, love between brothers and sisters, parental love, the love of a long-term relationship, friendship, and the marvelous, unconditional love between humans and their four-legged companions. She also describes New York City so well, it's as if she's built the physical city through the sheer accurate precision of her words.

I didn't think people wrote books such as "The New Yorkers" any more, as publishers nowadays seem content with feeding us shallow chick lit with cardboard characters, predictable plots and unremarkable writing. What a gift to have a novel as deep, witty and complex as life itself. I love this novel with a devotion worthy of a dog.

NEVER SUCK A DEAD MAN'S HAND

>>Never Suck a Dead Man's Hand: Curious Adventures of a CSI: by Dana Kollmann ($23.95, Citadel Press)

>>title and cover:

When I stumbled upon this book, I thought it was a superb title. A friend and I pondered its significance. Having seen CSI shows on TV, she speculated: "If you kill someone, maybe you should never suck their hand, because you'll leave your DNA behind and they can use that to track you down."

But the title turned out to be more practical than that. The author answers the question in the book's second chapter. Why should you never suck a dead man's hand? Because it's a gross thing to do; you just don't want a corpse's hand in your mouth.

For those browsing the bookshelves, the title stops you dead in your tracks, no pun intended. And it has staying power; I found myself chuckling over it throughout the course of reading the book.

You'd expect the cover of a book about the life of a crime scene investigator to be something repellent: a dead man's hand, perhaps. But jacket designer Kristen Hayes uses a photograph of an oversized rainbow-flavored lollipop. (Crime scene investigators often eat candy or chew gum in attempts to counteract the stench of death and decay.) The tiny, embossed flies, perhaps looking for a corpse on which they can feast and lay their eggs, are scattered over the cover, front and back. More than once I tried to brush them away.

>>the book:

"Never Suck a Dead Man's Hand" relays a book about the odd experiences of Dana Kollman, a crime scene investigator. It's not a series of who-done-it cases, and it doesn't track a killing from the crime scene through the laboratory all the way to trial and conviction. It's a series of stories about Kollman's experiences gathering evidence at the scene of the crime. She deals with hostile policemen and indifferent relatives of victims. (One sits, eating fried chicken and watching "Wheel of Fortune," while his dead brother's corpse is upstairs in the bathroom.)

Kollman has a variety of strange tales, including having a corpse fall on top of her and yes, sucking a dead man's hand. Her writing's infused with an off-beat sense of humor, including a healthy dose of gallows humor those in medicine and law enforcement often use to distance themselves from the ugliness they deal with daily.

If you don't have a strong stomach, this book isn't for you. Kollman tells readers what the life of a real-life CSI is like...and it ain't like it's shown on TV. This is a book as quirky as its cover.