Maybe you’ve noticed an edgy new trend at the bookstore.
Stroll through the fantasy, romance or YA sections, look at some of the more popular titles, and you’ll start to see it: Novels not only featuring eye-catching cover illustrations – but also colorful images and richly printed designs running along the outer edges of the book’s pages.
You’ll find this treatment on editions of Brigid Kemmerer’s “Warrior, Princess, Assassin”; I.V. Marie’s “Immortal Consequences”; Michelle Jabès Corpora’s “His Face Is the Sun (Throne of Khetara, 1)” and Julia and Brad Riew’s “The Last Tiger” – and even Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling “Remarkably Bright Creatures.”
“It’s huge in the YA space,” says Maureen Palacios, the owner of Once Upon a Time Bookstore, about the trend on a recent Saturday at the Montrose bookshop. “But it has to be a certain kind of book; it has to be worthy of the treatment.”
As Palacios pulls out examples, she says that while it’s more typical on fantasy and YA books, there are exceptions.
“Very occasionally, if it goes with the story,” she says, showing off a stunning middle-grade novel, Grace Lin’s “The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon.” “Grace Lin, that’s such a pretty, pretty cover.”
Interested to learn more about the trend, I reached out to some experts …
Dreams from the edge
Alvina Ling, the vice president and editor-in-chief at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, edited and worked on Grace Lin’s best-seller “The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon,” including the deluxe limited-edition version stocked at Once Upon a Time.
Ling, who grew up in Diamond Bar, where her parents still live, explained some of the technical terms during a phone call this week.
“’Sprayed edges’ are usually just one color. If you have ‘gilded edges,’ that’s when it’s like a gold or silver metallic. And then ‘stenciled edges’ are when you can put a design on,” says Ling. Since this was Lin’s first fantasy novel in nearly a decade, Ling says they had been planning to create “a really beautiful package” with full-color interiors and foil on the covers.
“It was actually someone in our sales department who suggested adding the sprayed edges. Grace was really excited; I think it was one of her dreams,” says Ling. “Grace designed the edges herself.”
While the stenciled edge is a new addition to the design of her books, Lin, who is the subject of a career retrospective exhibit at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, has long been interested in the quality of her books, says Ling.
“Starting with [2009’s Newbery Honored] ‘Where the Mountain Meets the Moon,’ she really had the vision of making her books a beautiful object,” says Ling, who says the author and artist Lin wanted to produce the kind of books she felt had not always been available to her as a child, especially books with Asian content.
That’s a goal she and Lin share.
“When I got into publishing, one of my initiatives was to publish books that reflected the way our world is. Because when I was a child, I never saw Asian American characters in the books I was reading,” says Ling, who arrived at Little, Brown in 1999. “That’s something that I think has changed.”
And here’s the fun part: The editor and the author-artist not only have a long professional relationship, but they have also been close friends since they were 10 years old. And they’ve been cohosting a kidlit podcast together since 2019: Book Friends Forever, or B.F.F.
So when Ling is asked to talk about some highlights from the many popular and honored books she’s worked on with authors such as Peter Brown, Holly Black, Jewell Parker Rhodes and Chris Colfer, she does something unexpected.
She tells me her favorite out of all of them: Grace Lin’s debut novel, “The Year of the Dog.”
“Most editors say, ‘I can’t pick one. It’s like picking your favorite children,’” says Ling. “I feel like, well, I’m allowed.”
Why? “Her first novel, ‘The Year of the Dog,’ was inspired by our childhood friendship,” says Ling.
“It was surreal. It was also really delightful because, of course, that is the exact book I wish existed when I was that age. So for me it was gratifying working on that book and seeing it go out into the world,” she says. “My friends’ kids are starting to read it in their classrooms. It’s been really great to see.”
The origins of the stenciled edge trend
When asked about this hot new publishing trend, Allie Alvis, curator of Special Collections at the Winterthur Library in Delaware, provided some perspective.
First, it’s not exactly a recent innovation.
“The first book I ever encountered with a decorated edge was a medieval manuscript I was researching, so the urge to make book edges pretty is definitely not a new phenomenon,” said Alvis via email, explaining that books were originally shelved in libraries with their edges, not spines, facing out. “They really only started being shelved spine-out in the 17th century or so.”
Compared to medieval and early modern books, the utilitarian book form we expect today could seem a little dull, according to Alvis, who is also active on social media as Book Historia, where they share cool book stuff including a terrific piece on fore-edge paintings ranging from the 1580 work of Titian’s cousin to decorate a series of books with images of Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, and Erasmus to a 2008 book by artist Ed Ruscha.
“Some sport bright red, blue, or yellow edges, edges painted with patterns or coats of arms, or speckled edges made by strategically flinging paint at them. As time marches on, we begin to see marbled edges – made by suspending paint on a bath of viscous fluid and dipping the book’s edges into it – and shining gilt edges,” said Alvis of the evolution of the design.
Because we appreciated art and beauty more back then, right? Well, there were other reasons, too.
“All of these techniques were decorative, yes, but they served another purpose: to disguise how grungy a book’s edges could get! In the days of fireplaces and oil lamps, the soot and gunk in the air tended to settle on the tops of books. As that became less of an issue, the decoration remained, in part because that’s just how people expected books to look.”
Alvis says hidden fore-edge painting emerged in the late 18th century as a novelty and became popular in the 19th century. In fact, artists are still creating them, and Alvis suspects artisans of the past would want to get in on the action.
“The difference in historic decorated edges and those of today boils down to aesthetics and technology. I think if you handed a 17th-century bookbinder an airbrush, they would’ve been psyched! They may not have created the incredibly detailed and realistic designs we see on modern sprayed edges, but they would’ve gone hog wild with acanthus leaves and heraldry.
“It’s exciting to me the sheer variety of sprayed edge decorations that are out there, and I love how well they thematically fit with the books they adorn. Many 19th-century hidden fore-edge paintings are bucolic scenes that have little to do with the plot of the book, aside from maybe their geographic location, so it’s awesome to see dragons and swords and moon phases that harken back to the plot.”
And as for the future, Alvis thinks the current wave of edge work may just be the beginning – or a rebooting – of tried-and-true bookmaking efforts.
“I think the next frontier of modern book edge decoration is bringing back hidden fore-edge paintings,” they said.
“Sprayed edges are cool, but who can resist the delight of revealing a secret hidden in plain sight?”
