Cover story: a year of beautiful books

In his recent Booker acceptance speech, Julian Barnes did the usual polite thing of thanking his editors and his agent. But then, just when everyone thought he was done, he veered off in an entirely unexpected direction to pay animated tribute to Suzanne Dean, "the best book designer in town", who had turned his prize-winning novel into "a beautiful object". The Sense of an Ending does indeed come clad in a lovely cover, an elegiac visual riff on dandelion clocks, which darkens at the edge to black, an idea of mourning that then runs over the edges of the pages themselves. At least it does in the early editions. Such little touches are both fiddly and expensive (which comes to the same thing) so subsequent reprintings have left off the darkened page ends. It's a decision, Dean herself admits, that is going to make the first editions of the novel just that little bit more desirable in years to come.

Whatever might be thought of Barnes's novel, there was wide agreement that his public acknowledgment of the book's designer was a "moment", one that needed to be parsed for its implications. And chief among those implications seems to be that judging a book (at least partly) by its cover has become a legitimate thing to do. In addition to Dean at Random House, there is currently a whole slew of art editors, production directors and book designers who are going about their business with a new spring in their step. Nothing raises the spirits more than knowing that people are noticing your work, think it good, and want you to do more.    Read Here