Don't Judge A Book By The Cover

Don't Judge A Book By The Cover


This statement is one of the first that many of us learned in school,
so obviously true that explanation was not really necessary.

You can't really tell what is in a book by looking at the cover, thus
millions of dollars are spent every week on thousands of book reviews
from the New York Times, The Times of London, The Times of India, and
literally tens of thousands of other newspapers around the world.

Therefore, the question looms large as to why so many people who will
label themselves as book lovers actually comment more on the way that
books look than on the books' actual content?



To Read, Or Not To Read, That Is The Question


So many of the comments from insiders have ONLY to do with the forms,
layouts, fonts, bindings, paper, cataloging information, margination,
pagination, hyphenation and linguistic orthography, without any looks
or mentions at the actual content of the books that one begins really
to wonder if they have actually read the book at all, rather than big
efforts to look at the book without actually managing to read it.

This would be tatamount to "Car and Driver" reporting on cars without
actually driving them.

They would talk about the great paint job, how the low profile tires,
and low profile body work together to create a specific image, how an
interior was designed to work more spaciously than the actual numbers
of cubic feet available to each passenger, the window visibility, and
a host of other items such as the rich Corinthian leather upholstery,
but without doing some serious driving, there is no way to tell if an
automobile is real, it could just be a mock up that can't move.

If a book fails to move the reader, it has failed as a book in just a
similar manner as if a car fails to move its passengers.

All of this is, of course, totally academic if you don't read books.



The Appearance Of Books As Compared To The Appearance Of Persons


We've all been told "The clothes don't make the person," but we still
live in a society in which a major portion of the economy are created
in a effort to make people judge others by their appearance.

Even if you totally discount the Hollywood and haute couture fashion,
a billion people spend additional thousands of dollars to wear things
that create the illusion they want to project, rather than being what
they actually are, on the surface, as well as inside.

The arguments presented against books in similar conversations are an
example of exactly the same thing, only worse, as in these cases they
have not addressed the content of the books at all.


Here is a little list of the qualities of books compared to persons:


Persons           Books

Hair Color        Spine Appearance
Hair Style        Title
Height/Weight     Length/Weight
Hair Length       Page Size
Eye Color         Binding Color
Beauty            Paper Quality
Breeding          Catalog Data
Manicure          Page Layout
Nail Polish       Font Selection
Footwear          Binding Material
Language          Hyphenation
Accent            Orthography
Eyewear           Font Size
Skin Tone         Paper Color/Finish


Believe it or not, most of the comments received in the conversations
about these books concentrate on the elements on this list and not on
the actual contents of the books.

If a similar conversation were to take place about persons we know, a
conclusion would quickly be made that observations were superficial--
nothing to do with the actual person, just as the conversations about
the books here have nothing to do with the substantive material.

Psychologists and psychiatrists have a name for this fixation on some
secondary characteristics as opposed the the primary:

It is called "fetishism."


Of course, with the books under discussion, there is nothing stopping
anyone from choosing the exact appearance they find most attractive.

Anyone who complains is obviously just to lazy to made an adjustment.