Feb 16 - (Never) Judge a Book by its Cover
By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga
I love pictures. I love them so much I make them, look at them, go crazy over them and can’t get enough of sharing them with people. It’s probably the oldest form of communication if you consider most people didn’t really know how to read until fairly recently. Pictures make everything easier; in fact, there are people who refuse to read books if there are no pictures. And that makes total sense to me. I mean, I read books without pictures and I sometimes even read them more than once! In a book I recently re-re-re-read, full of life tips there was one that, as a “picture-maker”, stuck with me. It was something along the lines of “pick things you like looking at and look at them”. We all work with visuals, we choose colours we like and make them our favourites, choose things and people that just look good and stop talking when the person on the other side of the table is yawning. Visual cues are a better communicator than anything. Even typographers, whose obsession is lettering, work with the way the lettering looks to convey the message.
And that’s precisely how I found out the popular phrase “never judge a book by it’s cover” is absolute rubbish, for lack of a better word. A few years ago in a (what was probably about a month) period of extreme procrastination from what would determine the outcome of all my studies I decided studying typography was the way forward. I was up to here (pointing at top of the head) in words; both the ones I was working on (being a languages assignment) and the ones I was learning from. And I realised there was nothing more boring than a piece of paper with large chunks of text on it. I know what you’re all thinking, “it’s all about the message the words convey”, but I mean on first look. Somebody hands you a flyer down the street and it’s a large piece of black-upon-white text and you’re probably already looking for a bin, but if it looks good you might have a look. And it was during those hours of procrastination sifting through books between tall university library shelves that I realised I had spent two decades judging things by their cover. Of course the teachings in “never judge a book by its cover” are deeper than physically judging a book by its cover, I get that. But perhaps I’m of a small percentage of people that are happy to admit that they judge things by their exterior, all the time, and with great success.
Books, magazines, CDs and records, DVDs, restaurants, cafés, buildings in general, iOS apps, websites, food packaging… You get the idea, I formulate all my opinions on things in the first second and it’s really liberating. It’s fantastic. I’m not good with statistics but as a rough guide, and because people throw it about the whole time, I think it’s safe to safe I am right ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of the time. Here are a few examples of how it goes:
I’ll spot a building I find visually appealing and look at it all over, take in every detail, if it’s nice I’ll take a photo and then a lot of the time through, like Dylan said, a simple twist of fate I’ll end up inside. Maybe immediately, maybe months or years later, and realise I was right all along; it’s beautiful on the inside too.
Or I’ll walk down a street and see a restaurant, bar or a café and have a peak, this looks promising, I like the way they’ve laid everything out, the person behind the counter looks good, I’m going in; and boom, great place!
Or I’ll walk into a bookshop or record store and just sift through shelves and racks of books and records, take photos or take notes on my phone of the covers that have caught my eye and look them up later to find out it would have been completely safe to buy it all on impulse.
It works every time. Or almost every time, I do admit I’ll sometimes be disappointed but take a look at my CD collection, my magazine and book collection and you’ll notice that the vast majority of the time the content is great. But just think about it, it would be very strange to put a lot of effort on the content and none on the packaging, you’d be stupid to do so. So I urge you to give it a shot, ignore that voice that’s telling you not to judge things by their cover, seriously, give it a shot, I find it extremely relaxing.
Oh and about that point-one per cent of the time I mess up? Well, I’m just an idiot who judges a book by its cover anyway.
Stefano is an artist, photographer, translator and linguist. You can find more of his work at:
www.instagram.com/stefanoblanca
