Recently, my favourite pastime has been wandering through bookshops, not because I’m looking for anything in particular, but just because I love the feeling of being surrounded by books I’ve not read. I love the smell of new paper, looking at all the covers, seeing what’s new since I was last in, picking a couple of books up and flipping through them, and occasionally discovering a book that’s just too good for me to resist picking it up and taking it home with me. They’re the best sorts of new friends, the ones I wasn’t expecting, but which were so good I couldn’t resist their charms.
It’s always the cover that gets to me first. I love books with unique artwork, bold art styles, and often very simple designs. There’s something about a bold, hand drawn cover that really sticks out to me. Especially if it’s very limited in colour. I have a real soft spot for covers that only use three or four colours. Somehow, the limitations inspire great creativity. Some of my favourite book covers have a really limited palette, like on Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, which is in black, white, and red, or Marie Lu’s The Kingdom of Back, which is almost completely in blue and white. (Or my own books, haha.)
If I love the cover, you can be sure that I’m checking out the title next. There’s such an art to a good title. Some books have titles that are so generic and unmemorable that my eyes automatically flit over them. Some have titles that are super similar. In YA fantasy, I’ve seen a lot of books titled some variation of A Kingdom of ___ and ___ to the point it’s become a social media meme. Not that they’re not fun, but there are certainly quite a lot of them. Especially if they’re also including some mention of ‘ash’ or ‘bone’.
A good combination of amazing cover and intriguing title is what tips the balance and gets the book off the shelf and into my hands to check out the back cover blurb. I need to know if the story inside sounds like it’s going to live up to the promise on the jacket. There’s a particular art to writing an intriguing description that gives you just enough details to capture your interest, without giving the whole story away. It’s an art that I’ve been learning a little more with every book I write, and I certainly appreciate a good one when I see it on the shelf.
Some days I get very lucky and the cover, title and blurb all align with the bright promise of an amazing adventure. There’s an instant connection between me and the book, and I know that if I was to put it back on the shelf, I would pick it up the very next time I came into the shop, eager to check it out again. At that point, the battle is lost, not that I was probably fighting quite as hard as I’d like to believe. That book is going to come home with me. After all, I can’t very well leave a new friend to languish on the shelf alone.
Wandering through the shelves is such an exciting pastime. You never know what bright cover is going to catch your eye, or what title will persuade you pick that book up off the shelf. There’s always the potential to find a new friend you can take home and love with all your heart. And even if I don’t find the right book to take home with me, it doesn’t matter, because half the pleasure is in the looking, the time spent with the books, just exploring, flipping through them, and feeding my bookish soul with the feeling of fresh new pages, and carefully crafted words. Bookshops are my favourite places.
Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
