The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

by Gabrielle Zevin

But jackets are the redheaded stepchildren of book publishing. We blame them for everything.”

This is true. When a book "fails to perform," the finger is invariably pointed at the jacket. Sometimes, of course, a book's underperformance has nothing to do with the jacket: a book can fail because of bad timing, the marketplace's whims, the publisher's enthusiasm for it (or the publisher's greater enthusiasm for another title on the same list), the book itself, etc., etc. But the jacket, publishers can control. And so we beat on, blaming the jacket. Maybe it's hopeful to blame the jacket, in a way. Any book might be a bestseller if only we could just find the right outfit for her to wear. The flipside of this is that I rarely think a book succeeds because of a great jacket... And I also think people sometimes say that a book has a great jacket BECAUSE the book was successful, and not because the jacket was particularly great. What are your favorite jackets, and why?