JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER

Mostly, when I buy a book, it's through recommendation or because I have seen a good review somewhere. However a friend recently lent me two books from the Penguin Great Ideas series. One was Seneca's On The Shortness of Life and the other was Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Admittedly, I would never have read either had the book covers not been so handsome! After staring at their beautiful, letter pressed faces for a pronounced lenght of time, I proceeded to touch them (in a non perverse way). It was a really odd feeling, I rarely feel this way about books - there was a part of me that wanted to preserve these beauties and not dog ear the pages or bend the spine.

Although I actually found them fairly difficult to stomach, my Amazon wishlist now contains all five series of the Great Ideas range and it's all because of these pretty prints! Is it shallow to want to read a book just because its easy on the eye? Is it even shallower to want to be seen toting around a copy because it's so good looking?

David Pearson is brains behind these lovely covers and he has made many a difficult subject matter such as Philosophy, Science and Politics accessible to everyone. He's truly a genius in my eyes.