Finding books by their covers. Or, why hasn't a search engine been made already?..

BLOT: (02 Jan 2012 - 02:35:29 PM)

Finding books by their covers. Or, why hasn't a search engine been made already?..

There is an old joke, with dozens of variations, told amongst booksellers and librarian types, that goes, roughly, "Why don't we sort books the color of their cover¹, so when someone comes in asking for that book with the blue cover it will speed things up." It is not funny, in the way that jokes are, but often gets a wry, sad chuckle from those in-the-know that hear it because, gosh darn it, it is true. Of the people that come in on a book quest half are their just to browse and of the other half, the seekers, half of them only know the sketchiest details and yet act as though it should trigger all manner of memories to the hapless clerk being used for assistance. While the cover color criteria is mostly a joke—I'd say less than 1% ever really rely solely on it—it nevertheless illuminates the issue: if a person spots a book at random but does not purchase it, despite being interested, the most likely things they will remember are a) some specific detail on the cover, b) the rest of cover [roughly], c) some random phrase from the blurb on the back, and d) a semblance of the title. If they do remember the author, it will be only the sex—"that guy" or "the lady who writes books"—and often incorrectly. We are a race of people who can not remember the way a given president faces on a particular denomination bill, and we see money fairly constantly; what hope can we have for a book that was once spotted on a friend's coffee table during a party?

The real question is, I think, why haven't we [booksellers and librarian types] started to appreciate this more? Maybe it would be a waste of our time, ultimately, but it seems like some brief cover-notes could go into a book's description. Something like a general concept grouping. Colors, sure, types of titles. Animals used. How many covers have gun sights? Couldn't you see it, a person coming up and going, "Give me every book you have with gun sights on the cover!"? That would sell, dammit. In an academic library setting, we often have 15 books with the title Quantum Mechanics, but most have varying covers. "I want the one with the turtle with the tangent lines coming off of it!" See? Simple!

These were musings I had this morning while trying to track down a set of books that I knew existed, and I knew involved Sherlock Holmes. I was working at Waldenbooks when I spotted them, Christmas-season 2004. At the time, I eschewed most any pastiche of most anything, and so I quickly dismissed them. All I recalled was that a) the cover had a woman in a kimono holding a calabash pipe and b) somehow both Mycroft and a woman not Irene Adler were involved. The cover was black. I should say "covers", since there were a few in a row that had almost identical covers, except the kimono would change from one bright hue to another. Lately, as my Holmes fascination has grown, I have been trying to wade through the miles-deep sea of pastiche, even diving into such as Solar Pons, and in the wandering, I thought back to those in Waldenbooks. Except, well, all I could remember was the details above. Right now we are in the midst of a Holmes bonanza, where every little bitty short story that has discussed Holmes in the past 100 years is getting reprinted, often in faux series that were not originally intended [see Titan Books many volume collection of the "Further Adventures"]. Needle in the haystack, and what's worse, this was a haystack that suggested missing details about what the needle might look like. I would have to tread carefully or end up convinced I had a hit when I didn't.

My initial search was for phrases like "Holmes pastiche woman in kimono holding pipe" and that got me nowhere. So I expanded it outward to phrases like "Holmes pastiche" and just read through everything. Finally, I found some online bookseller that had a long list of used Holmes pastiches, and then I scanned it and found it, not by words or by author, but by the cover. It was one of a series of books by Laurie R. King featuring extra-cannonical Mary Russel as a woman who meets and falls in love with [I think, maybe even marries] Holmes later in his life. The one in question, The Game, seen below, involved the blurb about Mycroft.

By the way, it was made more difficult by the fact that the books have been republished in trade softcover [a common move to drive up the price by publishers, though at least it also tends to drive up the quality] and the current cover looks like this:

The previous cover, the one that got my attention a little over 7 years ago as I was shelving them near Christmas season, was this:

If nothing else, one thing I am sure is that if I had shelved the new cover, I probably would never have even looked at the back blurb unless I just happened to spot the word "Holmes" on the front. So, even if we never ever develop a proper by-cover search engine, we should always strive to give the potential reader something to recall about our covers. Give them something that will let them find the book nearly a decade down the road, a splash of something.

1: Note, over the past five years most libraries and most bookstores have added systems that allow them to see bookcovers. At one point, though, we tended to make due with simple text-only screens that did not even describe the bookcover. In the older days questions about "Have you seen this or that blue or green or whichever" book were basically unanswerable unless the bookseller/etc had seen it and the chances always were that they had seen dozens of books close to that description.

Happy searching!

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