I went to a book store the other day. It was nice, spacious, full of books, coffee and Duck Dynasty merchandise. The usual. I walked up to a shelf and picked up a book. It was clear that someone had put a lot of work into the cover of this book. It had a beautiful illustration, well balanced color scheme and perfect use of fonts. All around, it was a beautiful cover.

Naturally, I didn’t open the book. It was clear that I had seen all I needed to see about this book so I moved on to the next one on the shelf. This one had flowers on the cover. I have no idea what it was about, but the flowers were pretty and had many colors. The font use left a little to be desired but I quite enjoyed looking at it anyway.

I skipped the next book cause the cover had weird colors and a big crow and even used Comic Sans, hideous thing to be honest.  But the book after that had a very pleasing cover so I spent a few minutes looking at it before putting it down. I looked at the covers of a few other books, but quite honestly, there was not much to say about them. Some of them even used Helvetica for the book title.

Later that day I got together with some friends and we talked about the books I had seen at the store. Turns out they had also seen many of those same books so we spent a while discussing how great the covers were in most of them. But not the one with the crow cause none of us had paid much attention to it. I mean, what for?

Then this guy, Peter, he’s a little weird, kind of geeky, he comes in and hears us talking about all these great books. Well, he thinks it is absurd for us to be only looking at the covers of these books. In fact, he says he even read the ugly book with the crow on the cover, and it is a fantastic book. He says it is smart, full of interesting ideas and with a great sense of humor.

We just laughed.

Poor Peter. I don’t know where he gets this stuff. We told him he should come with us next time and look at book covers so he can really learn about books. Well, he looks at us like we’re idiots. He says he’d rather read the books.

Oh please.

What would he know about books?