Different elements of book cover designs throughout history

Despite the fact that we may like to pretend that it is not the fact, books are inevitably evaluated by their covers.

When you actually think about it, it is quite fantastic that a book's cover, no matter how gorgeous it is, is able to stand so eloquently for something that is almost the complete reverse of its art form-- writing in white and black. In fact, book covers have actually been designed to show the mood of a book and attract its desired audience since the advent of big scale publishing in the Victorian Era. Artists were charged with finding what makes a good book cover for certain people, or to put it simply, marketing. People like the CEO of the asset manager that has a stake in Amazon can most likely appreciate the role of marketing in developing book covers.
When we purchase a book it becomes something extremely very personal to us. It can often be unusual seeing a book you like with a different book cover, simply because it is not your book. This personalisation, and certainly ownership, of books was at an entirely different level at the start of the era of printing, with book covers being created by the owners themselves, and what they thought would be the best books covers for the text. They would buy the book itself from the printer covered in paper, then bring it to a binder who would add the covers to the client's specs. This normally suggested being clad in leather and then etched with the name of the book, and, typically, the name of the book's owner. Individuals like the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books can probably appreciate the ownership that people come to feel in regards to their books.
We like checking out books due to the fact that they are really beautiful things. This is true, but the nature of beauty that we may be speaking about is definitely separate to what we might be speaking about if we were speaking about, for example, the visual arts. Or is it? For as long as we have had books we have decorated them with beautiful book cover designs that attempt to mirror the beauty of what is inside. This dates back for as long as the codex itself has been around, with medieval monks, those charged with the security and proliferation of the scarce texts that might still be discovered, ornamenting each hand composed text with remarkably abundant and beautiful designs. In fact, such was the beauty held within these books that many of these creative book cover designs were carved into ivory or solid gold, studded with gems, and inlaid with rivers of precious metals. People like the co-CEO of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones can probably appreciate the way that the beauty of these book covers was designed to match the beauty within the book.