Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover

They say don’t judge a book by its cover; so why do the Harry Potter books have separate child and adult covers?

The phenomenal success of J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard series has meant that the Harry Potter debate is no longer relevant. The books are now read by such a large audience that they have become as much a part of contemporary popular British culture as Big Brother.

The debate was that Harry Potter is clearly a children’s book and therefore should only be read by children. ‘Aah, but adults can read it too!’ cried the slightly embarrassed legal drinking age fans of the series. This in itself was a baffling statement; because of course adults can read children’s books. An adult can read Spot Says Woof perfectly easily but it doesn’t make it OK for them to shamelessly display it in public. ‘Well, Harry Potter’s quite dark you know’ they responded. As if to legitimise its adult readership, each book is heralded as being ‘the darkest one yet’. Of course this is all relative – get a Harry Potter fan to read a chapter of American Psycho and them let them say which one is darker.

However, the merits of reading Harry Potter are no longer debatable. Despite a large part of its (mainly young) audience seeing the series as an escape to another world and a symbol of individuality; it is conversely a symbol of conformity. This is why so many readers of the book proudly display their copy of the novel in public. There they sit, on trains or on park benches, proudly holding copies of their new book, like a teenage boy wearing his club’s new home shirt. It is a statement that says ‘I am part of something popular, I am part of something that is now, I am part of IT’.

So why are there separate adult and child covers for the book? The reason for there being alternative covers is, quite frankly, baffling. Yet at the same time it is a stroke of marketing genius. The buyers of the adult cover are, unsurprisingly, adults; keen to display to the surrounding public that what they are reading is an acceptable adult’s book. This of course, totally misses the point.

Everyone knows that it is a children’s book and almost everyone (including this once cynical writer) accepts that it’s perfectly OK for adults to read the novel. Yet the marketing people at Bloomsbury know that the general public cannot help but to judge someone/something on its appearance and this is why the adult covers are published. So buyers of the adult cover are arguably buying the book for its status as much as they are for its content. The very fact that the adult cover may actually outsell the children’s edition says something about our society. It says that it seems that millions of people, quite literally, do judge a book by its cover.