Cat and Bear investigate: JUDGING BOOKS BY THEIR COVERS

<-----(LOOK! SPANISH SCI-FI! & that alien made me laugh.)

I love books.
I really love books.
Books are lovely.
Books are nice.
Nicer than a lot of things.

Like junk mail.
And really ugly dogs.
And having to get up early.

And mushrooms.

But then I get annoyed a lot. Because often you come across these really disgusting books. I mean, really bad, awful, horrible books. I mean. Like. Books with really bad covers. And books made out of recycled paper (although recycled paper's not actually that bad, since it saves the mass murdering of trees in the Amazon rainforest - it's just that books made out of recycled paper always seem to be a weird off colour brown, and have a dodgy sandy texture, and are kind of seethrough. Yeah.)

Well, what i mean is, you'll pick up a book. First thing that strikes you is the unfashionable, crudely drawn picture of, say, a dog that looks like a cross between a boar and a crocodile. Or, the photgraph of the two headed man with his eyes being torn out. Or, the not very nice picture of a naked woman, posing in such a way as to suggest that you are looking not at the front cover of a book, but at the front cover of a lewd magazine aimed mainly at a pubescent male audience. (And I have actually experienced a time when I desperately wanted to read at least three books - except they all had naked or semi-naked people gracing the front covers.) And you know, it's not nice. I want to pick up a book I can read safely on a bus, without looking like a sadist, or making publicly known my more "exotic" interests.

And it makes you wonder. What the hell were those people at Random House or Penguin or Hodder and other publishing companies thinking? If your one chance to grab someone's attention is the cover, well it makes sense to use something ridiculously eye-catching. But no-one is going to buy it if the cover is so eye-catching, you want to tear your eyes out.

Which is one of those reasons why Science-Fiction so abhors me. Science Fiction books are the worst culprits for this kind of thing. If you don't believe me, check out the Science Fiction department in the library. It's disgusting.

Love, (but no love to sci-fi book cover artists,)
Cat.

(p.s. now i have to find a picture of a sci-fi book cover bad enough to put here.. And also, looking at all those sci-fi covers, i realise i inevitably have to publish a post about sci fi in general.)