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    The Clothing of Books: An Essay
    The Clothing of Books: An Essay
    The Clothing of Books: An Essay
    Ebook40 pages30 minutes

    The Clothing of Books: An Essay

    By Jhumpa Lahiri

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A deeply personal reflection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Namesake that explores the art of the book jacket from the perspectives of both reader and writer.

    How do you clothe a book? Probing the complex relationships between text and image, author and designer, and art and commerce, Lahiri delves into the role of the uniform; explains what book jackets and design have come to mean to her; and how, sometimes, “the covers become a part of me.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
    Release dateNov 15, 2016
    ISBN9780525432760
    Author

    Jhumpa Lahiri

    Jhumpa Lahiri has been a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, but is currently teaching in New York. She has published her fiction in various US journals including the New Yorker, and has won several US prizes for her work.

    Read more from Jhumpa Lahiri

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    Reviews for The Clothing of Books

    3.5/5

    68 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The Clothing of Books was a lovely short piece about book cover design, from the writer’s perspective. It’s a really short and quick read, great for any book lover.

      “We don’t live in a world in which a cover can simply reflect the sense and style of the book. Today more than ever the cover shoulders an additional weight. Its function is much more commercial than aesthetic. It succeeds or fails in the market.”
    • 4/5
      The Clothing of Books was originally presented as a lecture that ends up being a personal essay. So, this is a nice little volume that is a thoughtful look by Jhumpa Lahiri on the topic of book covers.

      "I did not own many books as a girl. I would go to the library, where books were often undressed: without jackets or any images."

      Also about these library books:

      "They had an anonymous quality, secretive. They gave nothing away in advance. To understand them, you had to read them."
    • 4/5
      On a trip to the bookstore to finish up some Christmas shopping, I found this book and a book on publishing in a tiny stack on a featured table, clearly abandoned there. Given how much time I'd spent obsessing over starting my own micro press recently, it felt like fate, so I immediately picked them up to buy them.

      This book is adapted from a speech that Lahiri gave in Italy at a festival. It mostly ends up very personal -- about how she feels about the covers of her books, but there were some interesting thoughts here. Particularly what it means for a book to be part of an edited series, and how the covers of such a series communicate that. As an micro press is, essentially, a series, I appreciated her thoughts here.

      I do think that I should read more on book design, from the designer's or the publisher's perspective. I'm glad I found this one to start me on my way.
    • 4/5
      Long essay that started life as a speech. Okay only, though I've never not enjoyed anything Lahiri's written on some level. This just seemed like maybe there needed to be a little more to it? But that is often the way when you experience something outside of the medium it was meant for. *shrug* Worth the small amount of time it took to read.
    • 3/5
      The Clothing of Books is the transcript of a speech Jhumpa Lahiri gave in Italy regarding her thoughts on book covers, which she sees as analogous to clothing on people.

      Like most authors, Lahiri has no say in the design of covers that go on her printed books. Sometimes she likes the designs her publishers have selected (there is typically a different design for each edition or translation), and sometimes she does not. There is a part of her that prefers the uniform covers some European publishers give to books in a series.

      This slender book took me less than half an hour to read. It probably could have been published as a long-form magazine article rather than as a standalone book.

    Book preview

    The Clothing of Books - Jhumpa Lahiri

    1.

    The Charm of the Uniform

    In the house of my father’s family in Calcutta, which I visited as a child, I would watch my cousins getting dressed in the mornings. They got themselves ready for school; I, on the other hand, was on vacation. They donned every morning, after bathing and before having breakfast, the same thing: a uniform.

    My cousins attended different schools and therefore their respective uniforms were also different. My male cousin wore navy blue cotton pants. My female cousin, a few years older, wore a sky-blue skirt. Apart from these two colors, and the yellow tie my male cousin had to knot around his collar, the rest of the uniform was identical: a white short-sleeved shirt, white socks, black shoes.

    In the closet there were surely two pairs of navy pants, two sky-blue skirts. It was enough to put on what was cleaned and pressed. In America, before leaving for India, my mother would buy several pairs of white socks, knowing that my aunt would be grateful for them.

    However simple and functional, I found my cousins’ uniforms splendid, fascinating. On the street, on buses and trams, I was struck by this visual language, thanks to which one could identify and classify thousands of students in such a large and populous city. Every uniform represented belonging to one school or another. Each of my peers in Calcutta enjoyed, to my eyes, a strong identity and, at the same time, a sort of anonymity. This is the effect of the uniform.

    I would have liked a uniform myself. Whenever I would go to the seamstress to be fitted for new clothes—a particular adventure I could experience only in India, where, in the 1970s, it was still common to wear handmade garments instead of buying one’s clothing in stores—I was tempted to ask for one. It was a foolish desire on my part. Apparel of this kind would have been of no use for me. In America I attended public school, where everyone wore what they wanted. And I was tormented by this choice, by this freedom.

    When I was a child, expressing myself through clothing was a source of anguish. I already felt different, conspicuous because of my name, my family, my appearance. In all other respects, I wanted to be just like everybody else. I dreamt of sameness, even invisibility. Instead, forced to find my own style, I felt badly dressed, the exception rather than the rule.

    It didn’t help that some of my classmates, finding my clothes somewhat strange, used to tease me.

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