Take a photo of a barcode or cover
The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature
David J. Alworth, Peter Mendelsund
One thing is certain: the book cover is always evolving, and as it continues to do so, it will continue shedding light on the shifting relationships among literature, culture, design, technology, media, and the economy. Indeed, the book cover is a prime example of what poet Ezra Pound called a "luminous detail": a bright spot, in a crowded cultural field, that enables us to see the world in a fresh way. That is, if we pause long enough to ponder it.
I used my own hand as the image for my first venture into the virtual world. The hand is one of the oldest of icons, a direct correspondence between imagination and execution. Healing energy is channeled through our hands. We extend a hand in greeting and service; we raise a hand as a pledge. Ocher handprints, thousands of years old, found stenciled in the Chauvet–Pont d'Arc Cave in southeastern France, were formed by spitting red pigment over a hand pressed against the stone wall to merge with an element of strength or perhaps to signal a prehistoric declaration of self.
Endow my offered affection with great patience and tender kisses, for our entanglement tastes like fresh raspberries plucked from honey-coated fingertips. Granted, being but a sea apart, all I could breathe is you.
All periods of time have ends to them, and these fatal endings we anticipate. A period of time—a day, an hour, a year-and this will end, we say; all this will end, the season will turn, and all will be over. We look in vain for some eternal moment, for happiness, felicity, that state of bliss that will go on for ever and ever. Is not happiness defined only when no term to its extent is imagined? So Rimbaud thought, it seems to me. His seasons are those stretches of time that open unawares and close painfully in our lives. That summer, those two years in the city, this love affair, that month in the country—these are the true, the organic epochs of our lives; the dates that mark their endings are our true anniversaries. Are not these the seasons Rimbaud wrote of: the implacable turning of seasons, and the denial of happiness implicit in their movement? Here then are the records of Rimbaud's Seasons—all his poems, his prose, most of his letters.
