- August 11th, 2008
- Filed under Musings
You know the old adage: “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Nonetheless, we do. How many times have you picked up a book in the bookstore because the cover caught your eye? That’s no accident—book designers know that an eye-catching cover results in sales.
One of the joys of creating a book is researching the images that will grace its pages—or its cover. There’s always that moment when—leafing through yet another folder of forgotten photos—your fingers abruptly stop, your eyes refocus and you know—you just know—that you’ve found a picture that just has to be in the book. Or on its cover. For me, that moment arrived one day in the summer of 2007 when I stumbled upon a picture of a trio of boys in a gallery at the Herron Museum, the predecessor of the IMA.
Wearing the sort of clothes that told me the undated image was probably from the 1950s, the three boys stood rapt in front of a bronze sculpture of a pair of young deer seemingly caught in the middle of roughhousing—exactly like a couple of kids at play. For me, the image captured precisely what the museum has striven to do since its earliest day—educate young people (and not-so-young ones, too) about art by showing works apt to intrigue them.
That photo certainly intrigued me. It said more in a single frame than I could have said in a page of text about the wonder that lives inside a museum, the sense of discovery that happens over and over, generation after generation, as each of us encounters that one piece of sculpture, painting, vase, tapestry, photograph—that speaks to us and lets us know that, yes, part of being human is communicating with one another across time, space and cultural differences.
Well, a few weeks ago, we had to pick an image for the cover of Every Way Possible, and I remembered that image, which I had pulled from the file and asked the museum’s photography department to scan into the digital database of images we created for the book project. We pulled it up on a monitor and everyone agreed that it should be a strong contender for the cover. But then… well, Jim Sholly, the book’s designer, found another image of a group of kids in a gallery that I had to agree was equally arresting. So that image became the cover shot.
But the photo of the three boys gazing at the bronze deer still got its day in the sun. It’s prominently displayed inside the book. Look for it when Every Way Possible is released in early October.
