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Each book comes with a cover. The writer and/or the publisher can enlist an artist to design the book's cover. If a book has new editions released, the cover may change. I have recently seen new editions released to coincide with TV adaptations on Netflix or Hulu. The cover can use the same image as the TV/movie thumbnail or include the streaming service's logo.
Cover art can run the gamut, ranging from simple text to a half-naked man for a romance book to pictures of food. I believe that a book's cover matters, even if we shouldn't fully judge a book by it. Statistically, people are more likely to buy or borrow books when they see the cover, rather than only the spine displayed sideways. This is a reason why I always notice empty book displays and find a nice-looking book to fill the space.
If we are told not to judge a book by its cover, then why do books even come with covers? Fantasy books have especially intricate covers and can show maps and details found inside. I think it's safe to judge a book by its cover just as long as you peek inside for a description, look up a review on it or simply read the first 100 pages. What do you have to lose?
How does the library's computer system know which cover to display for a book? In the book’s Machine-Readable Cataloging record, or MARC for short, specific identifiers match the book to a cover. The International Standard Book Number, or ISBN, is one such identifier that connects the record to the cover image.
Back in 2023, I completed a cataloging training course. This course helped me better understand MARC records and how to improve our cataloging system. One project I have been working on ever since is correcting and uploading missing cover images. Sometimes, if there is a slight error in the MARC record or the book is very old, we won't see the book's cover image in the catalog. To fix this, I can search online for the book and find its cover. Next, I import it into our system. If I can't find anything online, I can simply find the book on our shelves and snap a photo of its cover with my phone. That photo can then be uploaded and seen when searching the catalog.
Do you judge a book by its cover?
Book of the week!
If you are going to read one book, give this one a try...
Are They Dead Yet? The Art of the Obit by Sam Roberts
(New adult nonfiction: essays, social science)- 288 pages.
In a nutshell: Who we remember, how we forget, and where we find the true meaning in a life.
Since 2015, when he was assigned to the obituary desk at The New York Times, Roberts has "buried," as he puts it, some 1,600 individuals. Although he admits to having an aversion to death, he's found obit writing satisfying: "It necessitates heavy research, empowers writers with fewer fetters and opens a window onto undiscovered, even previously unknown worlds."
Succinct (between 800 and 1,200 words, though much longer for celebrities) and written to a short deadline, an obit aims to "capture the scope of an entire career and whether the world is better or worse because that person was briefly among its inhabitants." Besides providing "a memorial that is universal, accessible and eternal," obits reflect cultural and social values. Among many individuals not memorialized in the Times were "the photographer Diane Arbus, the poet Sylvia Plath and Alan Turing, the mathematician, computer scientist and code breaker who had been convicted under Britain's harsh homophobic statutes." Also omitted were blues singer Gladys Bentley, composer Scott Joplin and journalist Ida B. Wells. The newspaper's "Overlooked" section, with more than 250 installments online and in print, helps to rectify those omissions.
Some people are so famous that they merit advance-written obits, of which the Times has a stockpile of more than 2,000. Being interviewed for your own obituary, Roberts comments, is seen as "something of a status symbol." Besides referencing more than 200 obits from various publications, he considers how obituary writers are portrayed in fiction and movies, dubious claims of famous last words, quirky reasons some people get obituaries and reveals his own bright idea of finding out whether noted people were dead or alive (hence the book's title), a project carried out with zeal by his colleague Frank Bruni.
Bottom line: A brisk, witty look at writing about the dead.
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Vince Giordano has been the librarian and director of the Juniata County Library since April 2015.