The magic of book spines
If you love books, you can't resist the beauty of a unique cover. The sheer pleasure of purchasing books and arranging them on shelves is unrivalled. Reading at least one book in your life will teach you that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover.
And then there are the spines, which make the covers more alluring.
There is something intriguing about the designs of book spines. It's not just about the title and author's name. Sometimes the spines contain a little trailer of the book itself, giving readers a glimpse of what the book might be about. The choice of font and pictures associated with them make the book more tempting.
Take the A Song of Ice and Fire series as an example. On the spines of these books, you will see crowns, goblets, swords, and shields. These elements would make a fantasy-loving bibliophile fall in love with the series just by looking at the covers. The designs would make them curious about the breathtaking adventures they might contain.
Whenever it comes to spine art, manga, without a doubt, take the lead. Most manga have unique artworks on their spines. Usually, a new character is drawn in every volume, like in the manga volumes of My Hero Academia and the Demon Slayer series. Some series have this style where if you place all the books chronologically, you find a complete scene bloomed up altogether.
The appearance of a spine also demonstrates a great deal about a reader's relationship to their book. Spines stiffen and get crankier every single time you open the books. Also, reading them wide open could damage the spines, especially if they are paperbacks.
You can judge a book by how ragged, creased, and broken the spines are. When a book has more cracks, it shows that it is loved by its owner. Spaced out cracks signify that the pages were rushed. It's likely the reader was caught up in the thriller portion of that book and couldn't stand to read it fast enough.
Spines are the first thing you'll notice whenever you go to a bookstore to buy a book. So, it's the spine's obligation to make you fall in love with it, and sometimes the publishers and designers do a quite good job at this. A few publishers prefer to showcase the author's name instead of what the book might be about. In this way, the author's name gets a significant amount of exposure. Some designers are more creative about this, especially with children's books.
All in all, it's fascinating how book spines can portray so much creativity and tell so many stories.
The writer is a student at Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology.
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