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Essay

When Bad Covers Happen to Good Books

What to do about an ugly cover: 1. Brown bag it; 2. Reverse it; 3. Try spandex; 4. Use house paint; 5. Duct tape it; 6. Tear it off Credit...Illustration by Leanne Shapton

For the longest time I wondered why it took me so long to get around to reading certain books in my personal library. Last month I hit upon the answer when I took “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” on a trip to Los Angeles. I had not read Mark Twain’s masterpiece since my teens but had fond memories of that most unlikely of high school experiences — reading an assigned work I did not loathe. Now, decades later, I had every confidence that this experience would be repeated.

It was not. This, however, was not Twain’s fault; I simply could never get physically comfortable with the book. The problem was the packaging. My copy, which I’d picked up at a rummage sale, was a traditional Bantam Classic, but the cover was a doctored photo from the 1993 Walt Disney film version of the novel. It was typically nauseating Disney iconography, depicting a promiscuously cute little Huck, played by a very young Elijah Wood, and a surprisingly dapper Jim (Courtney B. Vance) sashaying through the woods into a gorgeous synthetic sunset. Tucked inside were pictures of Huck sucking on a corncob pipe, dickering with the Duke and the Dauphin, posing as an English valet. Every time I picked up the book, my eyes were lured back to those fulsome photos of Sugarplum Huck. I do not know what Huck looked like as Twain imagined him, any more than I know how F. Scott Fitzgerald envisioned Jay Gatsby. But Gatsby cannot look like Robert Redford, and the most memorable character in American fiction cannot look like the diabolically cuddly Elijah Wood. Cannot, cannot, cannot.

I ditched the Bantam edition of “Huck Finn” and when I returned home fished out a second copy I owned. But the experience was exactly the same. The cover of the Signet Classic was a drawing of a ruddy-cheeked scamp, buck teeth prominent, clutching an apple, with a perky little newsboy tam cocked at a saucy Depression-era angle. Here Huck bore an alarming similarity to both Jerry Mathers of “Leave It to Beaver” and Britney Spears. Revolting. So once again my efforts to polish off this peerless classic were stymied. I could never get more than a few pages into the book before the illustration on the cover made me sick.

All this prompted me to think more closely about magnificent books I had resisted reading over the years. The first to come to mind was Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” When I was in high school, the assigned version of Miller’s seminal play had a grim, depressing, green-and-brown cover depicting a stubby, doomed man with his back to the viewer, clutching two suitcases filled with merchandise for which no buyer could possibly be found. I was living in a subpar neighborhood at the time, and my dad was out of work, so it never seemed like that play was going to be as uplifting as “The Black Arrow.” So I never read it. A few years ago, when the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted an exhibition of postwar art that turned out to include some famous book covers — “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Catch-22,” “Soul on Ice” — I avoided the museum until the show closed.

Spurred by this recollection, I recently scrutinized my library to see how many unread books had disgusting covers. The results were staggering. In one bookcase sat rows and rows of beautiful Penguin classics. Beneath them sat my favorite works of fiction, all of which had very nice packaging, ranging from the catchy (Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood”) to the elegant (Andrea Barrett’s “Ship Fever”) to the ominous (Robert Olmstead’s “Coal Black Horse”). And beneath them were a few dozen gorgeous art books.

But in the next room, in the cabinet where I keep my unread books, I was stunned to realize how many of these neglected works were eyesores. Some were bland or ugly because they dated from earlier eras or because they came from England. Particularly ghastly was the 1951 Modern Library hardcover edition of Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward,” which looks like a trash-bagged Malevich drawing; a putrid aquamarine collection of Patrick White stories called “The Cockatoos”; and an uninspired 1976 “Portable Dorothy Parker,” adorned with a photo that made Parker look like the least amusing woman that ever lived, with the possible exception of Ayn Rand.

Some of the least appetizing covers were relatively new. The 1994 hardback of the Kinks front man Ray Davies’s “unauthorized” autobiography, “X-Ray” looked like a poster for a concert that had been canceled because of lackluster sales. A 2001 paperback of Louise Erdrich’s “Love Medicine” was chartreuse, orange and baby blue, a lethal combination even Milton Avery would have shied away from. And the 1983 edition of Grace Paley’s “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,” with its drab black, green and red cover, looked more like an out-of-date employee handbook: “A Handy Guide to Your 401(k)!”

It all added up. Until now, I’d thought that I had set these books aside for so many years because they were too daunting or, in the case of Thomas Mann, too dull. Now I realized that what these books had in common was that they were ugly. Really, really ugly. The 1987 hardback of George Perec’s “Life: A User’s Manual” is a dreary reimagining of a Balthus street scene. The shabby 1991 hardback edition of the Thomas C. Reeves biography “A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy” looks as if somebody in the design department got desperate and pasted clip art onto the cover seconds before it was shipped to the printer. A 1997 edition of “The Bad Seed” comes adorned with a photograph of a macabre doll that bears an odd resemblance to a girl I sat next to in fifth grade. A girl who creeped me out.

Gradually, I realized that the books I had put off reading for so long all had covers that screamed: “Pulp me! Pulp me!” I’d owned Jorge Luis Borges’s “Personal Anthology” for 35 years, but had never opened it because the cover looked like somebody had smeared mustard all over it. This may also be the reason I’d never taken a crack at Wallace Markfield’s unjustly overlooked novel “Teitlebaum’s Window,” or Don DeLillo’s “Libra.” Graphic vileness was also the common denominator linking “Stock Market Logic”; “Three Plays,” by Sean O’Casey; “Can You Drill a Hole Through Your Head and Survive?”; “History of the Conquest of Peru”; “The Crying of Lot 49”; “L’Assomoir” and even “The Satanic Verses.”

For years I’d put off reading Antonio Gramsci’s “Letters From Prison” because I thought it would depress me. Finally I realized why I’d never gotten very far into Willa Cather’s “O Pioneers!” Now it became clear why I had so long resisted the allure of “Climate: The Key to Understanding Business Cycles,” “A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World” and “When Golf Is a Ball.”

Thrilled by my discovery, I raced out and bought a copy of “Huckleberry Finn” with an inoffensive cover. I loved it! Then I did the same with “Nicholas Nickleby.” Fantastic! I then moved on to “Doctor Faustus,” a book I had tried to plow through a half-dozen times. No problem! That left only one more magic mountain to climb. I went to the library, checked out a copy of “Death of a Salesman” which was encased in perfectly innocuous packaging, and curled up in bed.

I hated every word of it. So much for that theory.

Joe Queenan’s memoir, “Closing Time,” will be released in paperback next spring.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 63 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: When Bad Covers Happen to Good Books. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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