I’m terrible for judging books by their covers. It’s precisely how I make my first decision about whether or not I’m going to enjoy them.
This technique may have been around for ages, but it was new to me on Saturday. It’s using coloured page edges on paperbacks. The first one I saw was this, with jet black pages:
It looked quite lovely with the deep red and gold. And when you turn it edge on it’s such a deep powdery black that it almost removes light. It’s a really nice effect.
Then I came across this blue one which I also liked a lot:
I wondered if it was just a thing that Canongate had done for Scarlet Thomas until I saw this:
For Penguin in a totally different book shop.
I’m probably well behind and everyone’s been rolling out coloured pages for ages. But because I normally get books from Amazon it’s rare that I get to see books that I don’t own edge on.
I’ve been missing out.