{"id":1416,"date":"2018-09-27T09:54:45","date_gmt":"2018-09-27T09:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/?p=1416"},"modified":"2018-09-27T10:03:41","modified_gmt":"2018-09-27T10:03:41","slug":"dont-judge-a-book-by-its-cover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/?p=1416","title":{"rendered":"(Don\u2019t) judge a book by its cover"},"content":{"rendered":"

This blogpost by Elton Barker was originally posted\u00a0on the blog Sententiae Antiquae<\/a>,\u00a0and republished here with minor alterations.<\/em><\/p>\n

As some of you on the Twitterverse may have seen, all this month\u00a0@OU_Classics<\/a>\u00a0has been celebrating the books that members of the department have published over the past few years.\u00a0This has been a great way to find out what colleagues spend their “spare” time on, as well as to enjoy how the books look and to speculate on the choice of image\u2014that arboreal\u00a0skeletal\u00a0hand gripping E-J’s book\u00a0Death Embodied<\/em><\/a>, for example, or the implied dialogue between Aristotle\u00a0and Homer in Jan’s\u00a0Homer\u2019s Iliad and the Trojan War<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When my own book on debate in Homer, historiography and tragedy was tweeted, I was reminded of a couple of things about the title: specifically why I had chosen to treat those genres in\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0order (wouldn’t historiography have been better discussed\u00a0after<\/em>\u00a0tragedy?), and my then\u00a0students’\u00a0game, when Google was just becoming a thing, of typing “Entering the Agon” into the search box and returning the result “Do you mean Enter the Dragon?”. But it also got me thinking about my choice of cover …<\/p>\n

With the possible exception of writing acknowledgements, I find choosing a cover image for a\u00a0book arguably the most pleasurable, and most difficult, of the final tasks that needs accomplishing before I can happily pack off my manuscript on its merry way to the press. Even if we are told otherwise (in the famous axiom not to judge a book by its cover), how a book looks can play a decisive role in its purchase; after the subject matter and author, it\u2019s the one thing that may determine whether I buy book a book or not. If I look on my bookshelves, for example, the dust jackets that stand out for me are: the famous image (from the so-called Fran\u00e7ois vase<\/a>) of Ajax carrying the dead body of Achilles that emblazons Greg Nagy\u2019s 1979 classic The Best of the Achaeans<\/a><\/em> (and Michael Lynn-George\u2019s equally ground-breaking Homeric criticism Epos: Word, Narrative and the Iliad<\/u><\/em><\/a>); the contemplative Regarding Penelope<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by Nancy Felson; the highly wrought, yet seductive, Medea<\/em><\/a> of James Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston; the satirical depiction of famous classicists playing characters from Aristophanes (!) on Martin Revermann\u2019s Comic Business<\/em><\/a>; and the striking pose of Gertrude Eysoldt captured in the role of Electra that advertises Simon Goldhill\u2019s Who Needs Greek?<\/em><\/a>. The arresting contemporary nature of this image (though the photograph dates back to 1903) hints at Goldhill\u2019s thesis of the continuing legacy of Victorian attitudes to, and contests over, the Classics that shape and inform our own implicated relationship with the subject.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\"Figure1a\"\"Figure1b\"\"Felson\"\"Clauss+Johnston\"<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"Figure2\"<\/a>\"Figure3\"<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

As these examples suggest, aesthetic looks isn\u2019t the only desideratum when it comes to choosing a book cover. For sure we want something that looks good; but it\u2019s equally, if not more, important for that image to say something about the book itself (a picture is worth a thousand words, right?), though perhaps not in an obvious or straightforward way. Let me explore this issue by reflecting on my own choice of three covers that I\u2019ve had the pleasure to be able to choose.<\/p>\n

The image I chose for my first book\u2014Entering the Agon: Dissent and authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy<\/em><\/a> (Oxford, 2009)\u2014is in many ways very traditional. It\u2019s the famous image (on the black-figure amphora by Exekias<\/a>) of Achilles and Ajax playing dice. But it\u2019s an image that worked for me not only because of its beauty\u2014though hats off here to the team at OUP who extended the pot\u2019s gleaming background (which sets off the black figures) to cover the entirety of the book\u2019s cover in a fiery golden afterglow.\u00a0\"Figure4\"This image also spoke to my book\u2019s subject matter: namely, the idea of contest (ag<\/em>\u014dn<\/em>) and its representation in ancient Greek literature. In truth, I had a hard time finding an image that worked for me. I wanted some kind of ancient Greek artistic representation; perhaps because it was my first book (the \u201cbook of the thesis\u201d), I felt it needed to be unambiguously classical. It should have been easy, right, to find an image from the whole corpus of ancient Greek ceramics, right? Wrong. I could find none of the scenes of debate in epic, history and tragedy, which were the core focus of my argument, that had been illustrated, not even\u2014as one may have expected\u2014the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon that starts off the Iliad <\/em>with such a bang. There is a fresco, highly fragmented, from Pompeii\u2019s House of the Dioscuri (on exhibition at the National Archaeological museum in Naples), which shows Achilles going for his sword; and of course there are later Renaissance paintings depicting the quarrel (such as Giovanni Battista\u00a0Gaulli\u2019s baroque rendering). But I could find none from the world of ancient Greek ceramics or friezes\u2014perhaps because, as Robin Osborne pointed out to me, Greek artists simply were less interested in illustrating literary stories than in creating their own. (It is striking that the wall paintings from Pompeii *do* look like illustrations of early Greek literary narratives, including the moment Euripides\u2019s Medea ponders killing her children.) What Exekias\u2019s scene of gaming heroes gave me was a hint not only of the formalisation of contest, but also of the prominence of Achilles (who in my argument institutionalises contest in the arena of debate) and, moreover, of his pairing with Ajax (whose story in Sophocles\u2019s tragedy formed one of my chapters).<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\"Figure5\"\"Figure6\"<\/a><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The second book I needed to choose an image for presented a rather different challenge. This was for an edited volume entitled: New Worlds out of Old Texts: <\/em>Revisiting Ancient Space and Place<\/em><\/a> (Oxford, 2016). \"Figure7\"The book derived from an interdisciplinary project that I had led called Hestia<\/a>, which investigated representations of space and place in Herodotus, as well as the spatial construction underpinning his Histories<\/em>. At the heart of the book was a discussion of the different disciplinary approaches that we undertook, spread over three chapters (which I co-authored with different team members), exploring: digital annotation and mapping (with Leif Isaksen and Jessica Ogden), geographical spatial theory (with Stefan Bouzarvoski), and philological close reading (with Chris Pelling). Our resulting book included other contributors working in this space (pardon the pun), who had presented at our conference in Oxford, and who, like our team, represented an array of disciplines\u2014not only Classical Studies, but also archaeology, digital humanities, and the history of thought. The image I wanted, then, needed to respect these different disciplinary approaches while at the same time hinting at ways in which they might be combined and intertwined (for inter<\/em>disciplinary research). And, of course, it needed to be in some way spatial, to suggest the complexity of trying to represent and unpick spatial entities and relations. A web-designer friend (a shout-out here to Richard Rowley of Agile Collective<\/a>) put me on to London-based artist Emma McNally, whose work attempts to \u201cportray essence not as substance\u2026 but rather as the result of a process of reciprocal determination, where individual lines, markings, and trajectories are brought to significance through their interrelations with those around them\u201d (https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/people\/emmamcnally\/<\/a>). After getting her approval (she was very happy for us to use her work provided that she got a copy of our book: gold armour for bronze, as Homer would say!), I chose her scratches, traces, spaces<\/a>. This work on graphite (\u201ca medium that lends itself perfectly to [a] sort of rhythmic making and unmaking. It is a material for palimpsest\u201d: ibid) seemed to me to perfectly capture the spatial palimpsests that many of us were striving to reveal and more closely examine in our texts, while also being provocatively new and overtly relational. Emma later informed me that the very same artwork was used by Ridley Scott as a navigation map in his latest Alien<\/em>prequel Convenant<\/em>. If it\u2019s good enough for Ridley\u2026!<\/p>\n

\"Figure8\"<\/p>\n

All this brings me to the last image\u2014the one that Joel had invited me to write about in the first place\u2026 Our book, Homer\u2019s Thebes<\/em>, sets out to argue that the Iliad<\/em> and Odyssey<\/em> (mis)represent heroes and themes from the Theban tradition to set out and realise the unique superiority of these texts in performance. In arguing this, we are attempting to view the Homeric poems in a new light, by emphasizing a non-hierarchical model of \u201creading\u201d them and the Epic Cycle together within the framework of oral-formulaic poetics and artistic rivalry. With this in mind, we wanted an image that suggested Homer in some way (epic poetry, heroes, etc.) but that wasn\u2019t a straightforward classical take on that. From a very early stage I was convinced that a cubist painting of some kind would work, with that central idea of taking something familiar (for us, reading Homer; for Homer\u2019s audience, the Troy story and the siege of Thebes) and, by viewing it from different perspectives, producing a radically different picture (a Troy story that emphasises internal conflict among the Achaeans, for instance). For me, cubist works echo the type of violent reception and adaptation that our book is about. But here we ran into a significant problem that meets anyone looking to reuse a contemporary image, whether that is a museum photograph of an ancient artefact or a modern painting in a gallery\u2019s collection: copyright. For all the cubist paintings that I could find that seemed to dialogue with our approach, the answer kept coming back from our publishers that we couldn\u2019t use them because of the copyright and\/or the costs involved. Out went The Thebaid<\/a> by Wyndham Lewis, along with his Composition<\/a>; we fared no better with Barbara Hepworth\u2019s Two Heroes<\/a>; we couldn\u2019t even use Le Po\u00e8te<\/a>by Picasso, even though I had sourced it from Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

Just as I was beginning to despair, and I thought that we would have to give up on this idea of a cubist-style makeover for our Homer, I had the inspiration to look for works by modern Greek artists. I knew that ever since the twentieth century, Greek writers and painters alike have been grappling with the problem of their country\u2019s complicated (and often times suffocating) classical legacy. And thus I had the fortune to come across the work of Nikos Engonopoulos<\/a>. He\u2019s the painter most famous in Greece for revisiting classical themes in a distinct modern style (tending towards surrealism). Having found a number of post-classical images that I thought that we could use, I contacted the person responsible for his website and who owns the copyright to his works, his daughter Errietti Engonopoulou. Like Emma, Errietti could not have been more accommodating, and immediately allowed us to use a high-resolution image of the image that we decided on.<\/p>\n

I present to you Engonopoulou\u2019s 1939 oil on canvas The poet and the muse<\/em>. We hope that you like it as much as we do.<\/p>\n

\"Figure9\"<\/p>\n

Elton<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This blogpost by Elton Barker was originally posted\u00a0on the blog Sententiae Antiquae,\u00a0and republished here with minor alterations. As some of you on the Twitterverse may have seen, all this month\u00a0@OU_Classics\u00a0has been celebrating the books that members of the department have published over the past few years.\u00a0This has been a great way to find out what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1416"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1434,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1416\/revisions\/1434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/classicalstudies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}