I often judge books by their covers and when I saw the cover of The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart I immediately decided that it was a book that my family would enjoy. I was correct.
It is supposedly bad to judge a book by its cover, but I find it to be quite effective and, although I don’t necessarily have a definitive algorithm in mind, there are apparently some “rules” that book covers tend to follow. Over the last few years, I’ve read a few articles about studies where AIs are trained to identify the genre of a book from the cover. I’ll leave an exhaustive search of those sorts of articles as an exercise for the reader, but I will highlight “Does the cover tell you something about a book? Use AI for genre classification” (20 February 2019) by Viridiana Romero Martinez as a fun sampling.
In the case of The Mysterious Benedict Society, the title is certainly a draw, but it’s the fantastic artwork by Carson Ellis which make the book cover (and the covers of the sequels) stand out. The title could be for a murder mystery or horror novel or even a dystopian science fiction book. The art somehow makes it clear that it’s a story about children and for children yet it does not pander to the “norm” (whatever that is). It’s playful and yet dark at the same time. Although not apparent at the first glance, after reading to book one can see the level of detail from the text that went into the visual.
Sometimes I make an incorrect assumption when judging, but I was certainly correct when it comes to The Mysterious Benedict Society and the sequels/prequels.
