From handwritten treasures bound in ivory and gemstones to judging a book by its cover in a bookshop today; this is the tale of book covers.

We are really lucky to reside in a period when we can simply stroll into a bookshop and pick a book that piques our fancy off the racks. How we pick a book is very much up for dispute, but evaluating a book by its cover can be an important part of that, as it has actually likely been thoroughly designed to attract our tastes (if it is a book we will enjoy obviously). Mass produced book covers go back to the Victorian period, when early marketers and artists attempted to figure out what makes a good book cover, producing lovely fabric book covers for more refined literary works, and pulpy paperbacks for lower-brow works. A similar system still runs today, as the founder of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones will probably know.

They state that a house without books resembles a room without windows. For those used to being encircled by beautiful book cover designs that is absolutely correct; books include a truly crucial, cosy feeling to a home. Individuals have actually been decorating their books ever since books were invented, their covers, which were, and still are, developed to secure the fragile pages within, covered with art developed to show the work within. The first book covers were embellished by monks in the middle ages, who would secure those particularly valuable, rare, handwritten works with elaborate creations made from carved ivory, frequently studding them with gemstones and precious metals. The care and richness shown to their decor reveals just what treasures books were throughout that time, as the CEO of the asset manager with a stake in Amazon will most likely value.

There is something incredible about creative book cover designs, but typically the feel of a book is just as important. Books that have leather covers, for example, constantly feel very special, like something very old and really crucial. Leather book covers date back to the renaissance, when printing made books much less unusual than throughout the middle ages when they needed to be copied out by hand, but the ability to read and own books was still restricted to a select few from the upper classes. At the time consumers did not buy their books whole, but collect them from the printers with a short-term joint and covered in paper, before taking them to be bound by professionals. This would almost always be in leather, etched with something easy, such as the name of the book, the author, and the initials of the proprietor. They must have felt like extremely essential, unique books undoubtedly, as the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books can most likely imagine.