I think the point is that the cover is never guaranteed to accurately represent the book.
Quality of cover =/= quality of book
Although, I’ll never buy a book where the author’s name is in bigger, bolder font than the title of the book.
I hate that trend in cover design and I refuse to support it.
Is this still a thing? I thought this was mostly popular in the 90s and dropped out of popularity in the last couple decades.
Yeah, the point of a book cover is to sell the book…
The point of a book cover is to cover the book.
I was told that the rest of the saying is “but it’s a good place to start.”
It’s generally used metaphorically. It just means you shouldn’t judge something based on appearances.
And modern book covers are designed to get you to pick up the book. Amazing covers don’t mean the book is necessarily good, it just means they had a great designer.
No. Some are richly designed to showcase the book contents and others are not. That’s the entire point! It’s not the books with fancy covers that are always the best. You could find a plain cover copy of The Hobbit in your local library next to another copy that is oversized with a gold-embossed cover and an amazing painting showing the party of 14 plus a Wizard huddled on a mountaintop against the storm…
…and they’re still the same book.
My copy of The Hobbit is really weird it’s just leather and says The Hobbit in gold inset writing.
Absolutely nothing on the back, or even a barcode.
Really old books tend not to have covered designs that seems to be a relatively modern phenomenon.
Yes, but you still don’t know if the content is good or bad.
Whenever there’s a “don’t judge” statement, I always remember this post from Tyler The Creator.
Due to primal instincts, it’s inevitable that we judge. So judge, but don’t discriminate. Seems like a good system to me. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Sounds like that uses a loaded connotation of the word discriminate. That word really just means to differentiate things from each other or discern distinct things.
I think a better way to say it would be: “judge, but don’t pre-judge.”
As long as you’re actually judging evidence in front of you, great. If you’re making shortcuts to judgments using superficial cues, that’s where you run into trouble.
That’s a good way of putting it.
It wasn’t when the idiom was coined. Have you seen hard-bound books from the 19th century in libraries?
