Nothing says "poetry" better than a ton of white space and stark black lettering. Or maybe it's my non-artistic self just getting in the way again. Maybe I'm supposed to see the sorrow of the world represented by the separation between our hero ("Poetics") and the object of his affection (the rose). Or maybe it's supposed to remind me of some specific poetry: "A rose by any other name...." No. Wait. That's Shakespeare, not Aristotle. Hmmm, what could I be missing? Or could it just be that this is a dumb cover? Could it really be that simple?
9 comments:
There is a whole series of classics with these generic yellow covers. And they really do echo the old yellow-box generics from the 70s.
At the risk of sounding boorish, The Poetics by Aristotle isn't really about poetry per se, though. (I'm sure you knew that.)
If I see that little red and green icon right, it's not even a series of classics. It's a publisher that takes out-of-print, hard-to-find (they say), public domain books and reprints them. All in generic yellow covers. There are other publishers that use other generic covers to do the same thing. They just don't want to waste any of those profits on graphics.
This cover says: "We didn't even try." But at least it doesn't look like an 8 year old drew it.
it looks like a novel version of the national geographic.
This cover says "In this current economic climate we couldn't afford a real artist."
LOL, the covers are pretty awful, aren't they?
I kind of like them, though. Those books are larger than the others on my shelf, and they're very no frills. I guess so that they can afford to print more obscure works? I mean, Penelope Aubin's Count de Vineval seems to only be available in that edition these days. (Looks like it's most of Aubin's stuff, according to amazon.)
In fairness, philosophy books are generally not known for their eye-catching design covers. About the only people who are going to buy them are philosophy students who'd rather have a cheap text than one with a pretty picture on the front. I know this from personal experience, BTW. A majority of my texts are some neutral colour with a stripe across the front and the title in black.
It's a print-on-demand publisher and all their covers look like that - on the plus side, they make a lot of out of print, out of copyright titles available. Lovely obscure victorian novels, too uncommercial to sell massmarket..
The book is from Kessinger Publishing, and they're a print-on-demand publisher of rare and out-of-print books. For us impoverished historians, they're one of the few affordable sources for the great 19th Century reference works.
I got my prized two-volume copy of "A New Classical Dictionary Of Greek And Roman Biography, Mythology and Geography" by William Smith and Charles Anthon (originally published in 1880) from Kessinger. It was probably the best book purchase I ever made in my life. Certainly the most informative.
So don't knock the yellow and white covers, please.
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