You Most Certainly CAN Judge a Book by its Cover

Last night my fiancee and I were discussing famous quotes or maxims or what-have-you that don't really make sense to us. I'll be posting on the others another time, but I wanted to start with "You can't judge a book by its cover."

What?

You can definitely judge a book by its cover. If not, publishers are wasting alot of time and money on the covers. You might not get a 100% accurate assessment, but you can JUDGE a book by its cover. And you can usually be pretty accurate.

For example:



Here's a phone book. It's from St. Louis. From 1983. Useful only if you have a grandparent or something that hasn't moved in the last 24 years, in which case you probably know the phone number anyway. Not something I'd care to read or have.

Or how about this:



This is a computer programing book. The languages covered in the book are right in the title. I'm not a programmer so, again, this book is of no use to me. I'm making that judgment by looking at the cover.

So maybe these examples don't count. Maybe it's actually novels and other forms of nonfiction that you can't judge by the cover. Let's try this out.



I've never seen this book before, but I'm telling you, it's a crappy romance novel. Guaranteed.



Run away. Fast.

Now it gets a little trickier.



I've never read King Lear. Don't know much about it. The cover is very nondescript. So can I judge it by its cover? If I hadn't known it was by Shakespeare, sure! I'd see the name "William Shakespeare." I'm guessing everyone pretty much has a preconceived notion about Shakespeare one way or the other, so one can certainly pass judgment on this book based on the cover alone.



Lets say you live in a vacuum. You've never heard of Catcher in the Rye or J.D. Salinger. Would you ever want to pick up this book? I might, thinking it was about baseball. Otherwise, I guess not, and I never would have read this, which was probably my favorite book when I was in high school.

So, fine. You can't judge Catcher in the Rye by its cover.

Unless there's a description written on the back cover.

So in summary, here's how the phrase should read.

"You can judge a book by its cover, even if the assessment isn't always 100% accurate. You can often get a good sense of whether the book is something that will interest you or not, and if you can't tell by the front cover, look at the back cover where there's usually a synopsis of the book."