This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  Well, first I saw the article in The New York Times, then I saw it online.  Sometimes it’s the other way around.  I see it online and then I see it in print.  Selling Books by Their Gilded Covers—a relatively large article for The New York Times, by the way.  And it has to do with the fact that one of the ways that they’re selling hardcopy books—hardcover books right now is because they are putting unique designs on the covers—embossed, die-cut, gilded in a variety of ways.  They list the books that have done them.  You can probably still find this article if you search for it on Google.  And they’re absolutely right.  The look of a book has a lot to do with my buying it.

In addition to the content, there’s something about the look of it that gets my attention.  If you go back in time you may remember that in the mass market paperback world of the 1960s and ‘70s, some of those mass market paperbacks were released with the same cover but with a different dominant color—red, green, blue.  In many cases they were embossed.  It was essentially the same cover with the same imagery and title, but they did something different.  Sometimes they even gold-embossed them just to get your attention, because people, some people are attuned to red and some people are attuned to green, and it would catch their eye, but it would be exactly the same book.  

And you would look down and say why did they do that book with three different covers?  Well, they did that because people were attracted to different colors and different approaches.

In the old days, you’d go back to the 1920s and 1930s because there were no slipcovers in those days, jackets if you will.  They put gilding on the cover of the book.  As the jacket came along you started to see more color, more lamination, more graphics on the cover.  And then if you took the jacket off, it became a plain vanilla kind of hard covering.  So this article is very interesting talking about how, in some cases, some of those kinds of books are coming back.  And I think it’s a great idea because again, the only books we’re going to have in our homes are the ones we want to save.  Anything we read electronically is going to go away.  But many of us are going to still save books for whatever reason.  I mean they’re still going to build bookcases to hold books, as well as other knickknacks.  

You want those books to be as pretty as possible and gilding them makes a difference.  And that’s my opinion.