The Book Less Seen

One frequently hears the injunction not to judge a book by its cover. Nonetheless, when handling actual books, used bookstore owners frequently do so. The whole romance novel genre has a tendency towards certain types of images on covers and the size and format is what gave rise to the term "pulp fiction".

Thus it is understandable how The Road Less Traveled: A new Psychology of Love (a book on psychology) was stacked with western romance novels in a bookstore in Bucharest, Romania. He likely had no training in Psychology other than that obtained by seeing people every day and the cover depicted a rose. Such covers generally are romance novels in the Western press hence the placement with other such novels.

While their may be depths unseen in an unostentatious cover, frequently the cover actual serves a similar function to the title in that it conditions the expectations of the reader. Few would pick up a copy of a historical work on the Gulags if the cover depicted Mikey Mouse. The actual practice of life is such that people need to simplify and generalize to acheive a moderate efficiency and comfort. Using covers as yet another means of classifying books uses visible traits to correlate with less visible ones (the genre) serves to make the life of the bookstore owner easier.

Thus in that vein, we may judge a book by its cover but be aware that the cover itself says little.