Lucky me - I just received a copy of The Photography of Modernist Cuisine - the art-book sibling of last year's Modernist Cuisine at Home and the previous year's Modernist Cuisine.  It's impressive in every way, especially its cover - 14" x 18" and featuring the top of a tomato, blown up to something like 50 times life-size.  It's a striking image, and it made me think about the purpose of cover art, in cookbooks.

The very earliest dust jackets were plain, and merely served to protect the outer surface of a bound book.  But  today's book covers and jackets are considered essential advertising space, and therefore answer almost exclusively to the publisher's marketing department.  (When I was an editor, many of my authors were surprised to learn how little say they had in their jacket design.)  It makes sense, when you think about it.

But cookbooks are an interesting case.  As I see it, there are basically 3 kinds of cookbook covers: finished food, raw ingredients, and what I'll call "character covers" (though there's probably a technical name for them I just don't know).  A "character cover" gets used most often when the book is a tie-in - to a TV chef, say, or a restaurant.  If you're buying this kind of book, the primary reason is its connection with the person or place featured on the cover.  That's why you will never see a Paula Deen, Rachael Ray or Nigella Lawson book that doesn't have its author on the cover.

Raw ingredients on a cover, I think, serve a different purpose.  Like the tomato on the cover above, they turn the reader's attention back on herself.  Yes, I *am* the kind of person who enjoys fresh asparagus!  I *am* the sort of person who enjoys cooking from scratch!  You can almost feel yourself getting started at your cutting board.  In this case, what you see reinforces your own sense of identity, making you feel good about purchasing a book that is, at some level, "like" you.

And as for finished dishes, these are the bread-and-butter (if you'll pardon the expression) of the industry.  If your mouth starts to water when you look at the cover, then you're more than halfway to a sale, right?  I have a theory they're particularly popular and successful among baking books, just because baked goods are almost always photogenic - as opposed to say, a fabulous-tasting but slightly brown and dumpy-looking boeuf bourgignon. (Of course, not even the most beautiful photography can guarantee you'll cook from a given book, as all of our sagging shelves attest.)

Now, let's not fool ourselves.  Of course, "What does the cover look like?" is not one of the first, or the best questions to ask yourself when buying a cookbook.  But there's no harm in acknowledging that a well-designed cover does have a certain effect.

What covers can't you resist when you're buying a cookbook?