The back cover is consulted only after the front has been favourably judged. It hides, often with its face to the wall like a naughty schoolchild, until flipped over in someone’s hands, their interest piqued. The front cover is eye-contact, the back a first conversation.
Fingers twist the book around and thumbs lock it in place, its corners nestled in our palms. Laid before our eyes is a banquet where everything is in its place, and with all the pleasing symmetries and sure features of a weather map. It offers the quiet assuredness of a childhood Sunday visit to our grandparents’ house: all is where it usually is and should be; everyone is sitting in their rightful positions on furniture which seems to be bolted to the carpet.
A back cover’s features are anchored and welcome. They exist, of course, to sell a book to us, yet only via the gentlest of whispered persuasions. There is often an endorsement quote from another author or a newspaper review, enthusing like a fan but never hectoring like some soap-box zealot. Two or three lines in larger fonts seek to summarise the book’s contents, leaving no obligation to read onwards through a size-12 blurb, itself sprinkled with soft and friendly adjectives such as ‘moving’ or ‘affectionate’.
Then, regular furniture rests at the cover’s foot: a clinical definition of the book’s genre to help booksellers – ‘Cycling/Travel’ directing the Saturday boy in his shelving chores; the cryptic codes and monochrome ribbons of the ISBN; prices nestled in the corner as if an afterthought, though not hidden to echo pernicious small print but murmured as if in apology that something so august as a book should be sullied by commerce; and details of a work’s publishing house, not often a common language but always a steadying presence. Such markings are an identity badge and lanyard asserting a book’s solid credentials without fuss. In their presence on each volume we consider reading they sate a human need for continuity and security.
The back cover may be obscured by its noisier big brother at the front, but while the latter offers lust and attraction, the former is an object of matter and substance. The two contrive to pull a reader towards a book, after which point love is entirely possible.