As AI output increasingly infiltrates the world — muddying the waters of visual art, writing, and even music — true and unique beauty has become increasingly precious to me. I’m frightened by a world where churning out “content” is valued over artistry, and I worry about a future where we will have difficulty distinguishing between artificially generated imitations of art, and the real thing. I worry the most about the convergence of anti-intellectualism with artificial intelligence, and the possibility that all of these changes will result in a general preference for “art” that twists and regurgitates what humans have spent years expressing. I don’t quite worry about a dystopia like the Twilight Zone’s “Eye of the Beholder;” my current concern is far more prosaic. I’m getting worried about book covers.
Even in my late twenties (ack), I regularly enjoy revisiting childhood classics. These favorite books unlock my most formative memories — I relish revisiting the sour pickles and sizzling bacon of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I love to reread Sydney Taylor’s descriptions of salty lox and piping hot chickpeas in All-of-a-Kind Family.
OK, a lot of my formative memories are food-related, but not all: Some of these books stuck with me beyond childhood because they transported me to worlds that were profoundly different from my own. And these books brought me there with a character who I could see myself in. One such favorite is the Newbery Honor-winning classic Catherine, Called Birdy.
Though it’s since been adapted into an Amazon Prime movie written by Lena Dunham, Catherine, Called Birdy wasn’t exactly cool when I fell in love with it. The book, written by Karen Cushman, is the reason I was a 10-year-old who thought “Corpus bones” was a cool profanity and desperately wanted to sleep in a curtained tester bed. This short novel sits at the intersection of historical fiction and spirited young heroines. (I’m realizing now that I will probably have to dedicate an essay to those very ladies.) It was weird, dark, and profoundly formative.
While the book is ostensibly for girls 12 and up, it’s a bawdy, vulgar, warts-and-all (literally) coming-of-age story set in the Middle Ages. It’s like the Canterbury Tales meets the Princess Diaries. Early in the book, Catherine sulks: “I am near fourteen and have never yet seen a hanging. My life is barren.” She develops a crush on her Crusader uncle; a character dies from a festering wound; baths are taken on a seasonal rather than daily basis; and throughout it all, she’s fending off the dreadful suitors her father tries to force her to marry by hook or by crook. The medieval world she lives in is so vividly portrayed I could see, hear, and smell it, from the dirty rushes on the floor to the endless fish for Lent. (Unlike my other childhood favorites, the food in this book was not so tempting. Eel pie didn’t quite catch my fancy.)
Like many of the novels I recall from back then, and in contrast to so many of the ones published today, the book’s original cover was accordingly odd-looking. Catherine’s not supposed to be pretty in the book, and on the cover, she isn’t; the illustration has the look of a plain van Eyck maiden. Behind her, a foppish suitor is strumming a lute in an appropriately rough-hewn setting. This was the cover that I grew up with, and it’s what drew me to the book in the first place. I could see that it was about a world that I had never visited before.
Overcome by a fit of nostalgia, I recently requested the book through my New York Public Library app. (Support your local libraries!) I was horrified to find that the book cover — and Catherine — had gotten a complete makeover.
I am not the only one to have noticed the change, but I am probably among the more upsetby it. The girl on the old cover looks odd, clever, and capable. The girl on the new cover looks like a Disney character; the halls of her castle are clean, and the English sky outside is as blue as a robin’s egg. She looks like she bathes every day and has never heard of a hanging or bear-baiting. It’s difficult to imagine a more extreme glamorization of the character depicted inside. Perhaps most frustratingly, she looks like a fantasy princess rather than a historic figure. Had I been raised on this cover instead of the original, I would have missed out on crucial knowledge, such as what a lute looks like, or what a wimple is. It was essential information like this that enabled me to be relentlessly bullied, and then moderately successful on a televised game show (Jeopardy!, for readers who don’t know — I can name drop it because I didn’t do that well). Put simply, I would not be who I am without the original cover.
This is not the only girls’ book1 to be transformed in this way. All of the below books portray nuanced, brave, and clever young women who chafe at the patriarchal norms of their times (whether in fantasy or history). The old covers looked hand-painted with loving care by people who evidently not only read the books, but seemed to grasp the spirit of their heroines. Today’s covers are flat, homogenous, and cartoonish. They even look like they could be AI-generated; and in fact, we are now at a point where even New York Times bestsellers cannot escape AI cover art, as The Verge reports was the case with the UK edition of Sarah J. Maas’s fantasy novel House of Earth and Blood.
The original covers spoke to me because the protagonists were visually depicted how they were described: 12-15 year old girls who were necessarily wise beyond their years because of the time they lived in. They were a bridge between the angsty reality of being a tween and the dream of becoming a self-assured, beautiful, independent young woman. The new covers just look like ordinary 12-15 year old girls in a fantasy setting. They are flat and boring; there is no texture to pore over, no twinkling eyes to gaze into.
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Why the shift? I’m no expert, but book cover artistry is inevitably bound by commerce; material concerns often dictate cover design, probably now more than ever as books must compete with unlimited forms of digital entertainment for our attention. I suspect that a steady diet of internet garbage, including AI-generated content, on YouTube (even YouTube Kids), TikTok, Instagram — not to mention the labyrinthine hell that is Roblox — has skewed kids’ visual preferences towards the cartoonish rather than the complex.
And cover aesthetics are equally important for many adult readers. The current trend has also tended to be similarly cartoonish; in an excellent 2021 essay for Eye on Design, Alana Pockros aptly dubbed the current rainbow gradient background / big, bold type aesthetic “unicorn frappuccino.”
A more insidious trend I’ve noticed among book covers targeted at young women: a real or faux-antique painting of a woman paired with bold type. Two prominent examples: Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (which slaps hot pink over a French Revolution-era portrait), and Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss (which complements a cropped Anna Weyant painting with lemon yellow type). You might think I’d like these covers because the women on them are a little odd and historic-looking in the same way Catherine is; I dislike them because they feel oddly curated, as if calculated to look cool when slipped into a Goyard tote. (In Rest and Relaxation’s case, it’s actually sanitized; the portrait has been airbrushed to censor the original’s visible semi-nudity.)
One iteration of this trend which I do like is Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House. Patchett commissioned a painting based on a pivotal portrait described in the book to bring it to life. It’s a faithful artistic portrayal of art described within the book, on the book — and beautifully done.
Now, a good book will furnish a mental image regardless of the cover — just consider Nabokov’s Lolita, which has been despaired of as impossible to create an appropriate cover for, while also being filled with some of the most evocative imagery of all time regardless of its cover art. But where they exist, the cover and illustrations are inextricably tied to the book’s actual contents in the reader’s mind just as much as the typeface is. Consider how different the Little House books appear when illustrated by Garth Williams versus Helen Sewell. Try to imagine Roald Dahl without Quentin Blake’s off-kilter and lively illustrations. The best covers and illustrations help bring the story to life; covers today increasingly flatten and subsume the rich words inside to a commercial proposition. I recognize that I cannot judge any book by its cover, but I deeply judge the commercial interests that increasingly reduce covers from eloquent portraits to babyfied attention-grabbers. (And don’t even get me started on the “Now a major motion picture” version that inevitably comes out for any adapted book.)
Returning to girls’ books, I was particularly saddened to see the new cover of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I hate to disagree with Judy Blume, who said that she wanted the new cover to be a book kids today would want to pick up. I understand the sentiment, but I also feel that today’s kids are increasingly losing their chance to choose from anything but spare, blocky, irrelevant, and undeniably sterile covers. As with Catherine, the new cover is devoid of the actual context (i.e., taking place in the 70s, when there were no smartphones). There is something that feels essentially wrong about using an Apple UI-centric cover for a book set in a time when mimeographing was a thing people knew about and actually did. In our current reality of unfeeling touch screens and impersonal connection, why kill the magic of individuality and oddity?
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Above all else, when we lose these covers, we lose something of that feeling of eternal connection — or at least I do. I liked seeing Margaret and Catherine in their “original” contexts. I liked feeling connected across the decades (or the centuries) to a girl I could relate to. Enticing audiences to read classic books with cartoonish or AI Frankenstein covers achieves nothing other than flattening the worlds we can visualize and, most tragically, makes our real world that much less authentically weird. It sanitizes reality and pretends that the world we live in today is the most interesting one imaginable. And to that I say: Corpus bones.
Thanks for reading! In other news, check out my latest essay for Apartment Therapy on my fondest memories of our family’s tradition of the “Japanese goodbye.” And much love to my family members who left “anonymous” supportive comments.
When I say girls’ book, I don’t mean it in a reductive, gendered way. I think of these as girls’ books because that’s the genre they were written for; obviously they are for everyone who wants to read them, but I identified with them keenly as exemplars for young girls like myself.