Publisher Aesthetics
Judging books by their cover? Publishers we look to when curating home libraries with a certain style.
We often rely on publishers like Europa Editions and Persephone Books to bring a sophisticated feel in a certain color scheme to a home library project.
by Tara Cheesman
There are ways to quickly curate a visually pleasing bookcase without resorting to recent trends like buying books-by-the-foot, removing all your dustjackets to create tonal conformity, or shelving by color. When we curate a home library, we consider books for both their content and their physical design. Through the years, we’ve discovered that many publishers do all the heavy lifting in terms of curating a distinctive design aesthetic. Whether it’s a carefully chosen color palette, uniform sizing and spine designs, or just a conspicuously positioned colophon -- a clever strategy is to identify publishers whose style you like and incorporate their books into your existing collection. Below are a few contemporary publishers you may or may not be familiar with who fit these criteria.
Archipelago Books
Archipelago Books, an independent publisher founded in 2003, specializes in “excellent translations of classic and contemporary world literature.” One of their most popular authors is the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard whose six-volume memoir, My Struggle became an unexpected literary hit. Archipelago Books publishes paperback originals and hardback editions in a distinctive square format. The paperbacks feature heavy, textured matte paper covers with French flaps. The cover and spine designs are standardized, with the same composition and fonts throughout, and all the books come in muted, earth-tone colors, which look lovely when shelved together.
Persephone Books
Persephone Books is a UK publisher and bookseller with a cultlike following and specialization in 20th Century women writers. They are beloved not only for their focus on female authors but for the care and thoughtfulness they put into design and branding. They publish numbered paperback editions. The books’ exteriors are identical in size and have matching “Persephone grey” covers and dustjackets (an unusual feature on a paperback). When placed on the bookshelf, they create a neutral block of color that fits into both traditional and modern interior schemes.
But inside the covers, this publisher’s creativity and attention to detail truly come to the fore. Each title has signature endpapers (the pages just inside the front and back covers) featuring reproductions of colorful, historical fabric patterns, chosen because of their connection to the text. For example, the endpapers for Persephone Books No. 92: Midsummer Night in the Workhouse by Diana Athill are “taken from a furnishing fabric purchased by Diana Athill for her flat in the 1970s”. Likewise, the endpapers for Persephone Book No. 114 Gardeners’ Choice by Evelyn Dunbar & Charles Mahoney reproduce the dust jacket of the original 1937. Persephone Books also creates a matching bookmark for each book. And while these books may be challenging to find in the States, they keep a shop in Bath, England, and accept international orders through their website.
The Library of America
The Library of America was the brainchild of the American writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson to collect & keep the best of American writing available in print. They publish everything -- from fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, to collections of sports writing, journalism, and correspondences -- all in handsome editions. The general public can purchase hardcover books in black dustjackets with white text and a red, white & blue stripe running horizontally across the width of the jacket like a pinstripe on a car.
In addition to single-volume collections, some numbering over 800 pages, they offer boxed sets of the collected works of a diverse range of writers like Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Madeleine L’Engle, and Wendell Berry. In addition, they publish Richard Wilbur’s translations of Moliere, as well as Reporting World War II, Reporting Civil Rights, & Virgil Thomson’s Musical Chronicles 1940-1954. And that’s only a small sampling of their wide-ranging and eclectic catalog.
The Library of America also has a second, subscription-based model, roughly following the same pattern as The Book of the Month Club. Subscribers receive beautiful slip-cased, clothbound editions by mail. They can return the volumes they don’t want and keep what they do. The Library of America is a publishing house whose mission is to help readers build comprehensive libraries around a specific category of literature.
33 1/3 from Bloomsbury
33 1/3, published through Bloomsbury Publishing, USA, is an exciting series of books we only recently learned about. It takes its name from the 33 1/3 RPM turntable speed. Each thin volume concentrates on a single music album, discussing the artist, recording history, and breaking it down song by song. The series is for music lovers. You can take a deep dive into individual albums by musicians like Miles Davis, Patti Smith, Nirvana, Prince, The Beach Boys, or Public Enemy. But they also explore the less obvious choices like Tom Waits, Pavement, Bobbie Gentry, Drive-By-Truckers, and Kendrick Lamar. The 33 1/3 Wikipedia page lists over 170 titles, and the series recently expanded to global music with 33 1/3 Brazil, Japan, and Europe. Each paperback is approximately 4-3/4” x 6-1/2” in size and with a unique three-square color block cover design featuring the album cover art in the top right corner. We can’t think of a better addition to a vinyl collectors’ library.
Europa Editions is perhaps the best-known publisher on our list. In 2015, The New York Times Style Magazine published an article titled “Europa Editions Objects of Desire: How a small Italian press managed to turn works in translation into a form of social currency.” It came out when everyone was reading Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Trilogy or, as the media called it, peak Ferrante Fever! Europa Editions, which has been around since 2005, specializes in translations and world literature. In addition to Ferrante, they publish Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog and the Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami.
The jellybean-colored paperbacks with white-bordered covers are very Instagram-friendly and have come to signal a kind of cosmopolitan cache to readers. With a few hardcover exceptions, Europa produces original paperback editions featuring French flaps, uniform sizing, a standard cover composition and font, and the recognizable stork logo on the spine. Their World Noir imprint is an excellent overall choice for mystery and crime lovers.
Tara Cheesman is a freelance book critic and a National Book Critics Circle member. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, CrimeReads, Guernica, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Mystery Tribune and other online publications. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.