With books increasingly judged by their covers, publishers are getting more innovative to keep pace with a dwindling generation of readers. From the flashy and flamboyant to the artistic, aesthetic and abstract, Indian book covers are caught up in an eye-candy race.

No longer a protective casing merely to bind a book together, the cover travels from an author's musings to editorial styling and a design team that creates jackets while trying to keep out an assembly line look.

This march towards originality is made up of photographs, paintings, doodles, caricatures, blank spaces, stark prints, cartoons, line drawings and creative letterings, setting the cover apart as a distinct entity sometimes from the book itself.

Says Deepti Talwar, senior editor at Rupa: 'That covers are very important is a truism. The main concern is to have it stand out among so many books out there.

'Indian covers, especially Rupa covers, can compete with the global best as production just got better,' Talwar told IANS.

The cover of Ramesh Menon's 'Mahabharata' (Rupa), designed by Moonis Ijlal, depicts the five Pandava princes in silhouette.

Says Ijlal: 'I was very intimidated when told to design the 'Mahabharata' cover. I designed it in a very secular tradition of an epic drama. It was a theatre-like appearance in which I made only two characters in colour - Krishna and Draupadi - and the rest remained black.'

C.P. Surendran's latest book of poems - 'Portraits Of The Space We Occupy' - unfolds under a childhood photograph, while Rajashree's debut novel 'Trust Me' has a sketching on its cover even as Chetan Bhagat's second bestseller 'One Night At A Call Centre' offers a geometric flower. Paintings, however, seem to spill over most covers these days.

Publishing house Katha, which has opted for reproductions of paintings as jackets, has highlighted artists like Manjit Bawa ('The Survivors'), Sanjay Bhattacharya ('Second Person Singular'), Jagannath Panda ('Sketches Of Memory'), Paresh Maity ('Alma Kabutari') and Tyeb Mehta ('The Man From Chinnamasta') among others.

Says Katha founder Geeta Dharmarajan: 'It was about eight to nine years ago that we began using paintings on our covers, seeing painters as storytellers who reiterate the magic of the story inside.

'Choosing an image has been a fascinating journey. Pictures do things to your brain that words don't, and together they help a reader to explore a story in a myriad different ways. The painterly eye is so different from the wordsmith's, and I suppose for every designer of book covers, it always starts with the story,' added Dharmarajan, who has also designed many covers.

Author inputs, though minimal, are still capable of steering a cover.

Rajorshi Chakraborti's debut novel 'Or The Day Seizes You', which was short-listed for the Hutch Crossword award this year, has two Salvador Dali paintings in the background - 'Le Sommeil' ('The Sleep') and 'The Persistence of Memory' - despite the fact that the book itself contains no reference to Dali or to surrealism.

Says Chakraborti: 'My editor asked for my ideas about the cover, and I emailed them several different photos as possibilities that seemed to visually express something of the novel's atmosphere. They got back to me with a few ideas, and I picked this one immediately.

'Its juxtapositions seemed to me wonderfully evocative of the mood of the book, and yet the image is opaque and mysterious, almost begging a story unto itself. So yes, there was a level of initial collaboration. But the design was Bena Sareen's (Penguin design head) original idea - of working with Manoj Jain's photograph - and I'm delighted with it.'

While the author wants to wrap his words in a cover evocative of content, editorial and marketing concerns prioritise the target audience.

Scholastics editor Sayoni Basu said: 'The thing to keep in mind is the age group and the content. But we have generally found that less adventurous covers work better, as does bold clear lettering.'

'Re-jacketing always makes a difference to sales. We re-jacketed 'Space In My Pocket' from an existing book that was formatted into our pocketbook series size and look. Sales picked up immediately. If the covers all have a certain kind of look, there is a sense of monotony. For the not very keen buyer, books start looking indistinguishable from each other.

'Some of our most successful books have been very bright photographic covers, which we find work particularly well for crafts and activity books. For fiction, we prefer illustrations that capture the flavour of the book and the author's style,' she added.

Says Chiki Sarkar, editor-in-chief of Random House: 'There is no philosophy, but there are two considerations: I want them to stand out in a crowd of books and different books need different approaches.'

'We've used a beautiful Mughal painting for our book out in May 'Beyond The Three Seas', a collection of travel writing by foreigners who came to India during that period. We wanted a beautiful Mughal painting and make the package look very pretty. We found a great picture from the early 18th century of a foreigner riding a horse ideal for the book.'

Sarkar added: 'In August we publish 'The Great Speeches Of Modern India', which is a collection of historic speeches in India from the 1890s to the present day. For that we've done a text-orientated jacket using the names of the people whose speeches we've included - as that is the big selling point of the book.'

However, if the Indian book-cover industry is booming, it is not pulling illustrators along with it yet.

'Designers never get royalty. Print runs for the book go into thousands, but the designer gets a onetime payment. There is no tradition of a work order mentioning conditions. Work order in the west for illustrators is very clear. They are entitled to the copyright of the original cover, royalty etc,' said Ijlal, who designs covers for Rupa, HarperCollins and Picador.

'Here the designer is not even handed a copy of the book whose cover they have conceived and created. He still has to nick the book,' he added.

- By Shinie Antony

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