In the New Yorker, Peter Mendelsund talks about designing book covers for iconic works of literature.
The thing that surprised me was how dogmatic people were. They felt that when they read a book they loved, they saw every aspect of it. Not only that, but they felt that the greatness of a book was predicated on the fact that they were able to visualize it. “That character was so real,” they’d say. That myth of the little homunculus sitting in the back of your skull, watching the author’s movie being projected onto the front of your skull—that’s really important to people. But the whole edifice crumbles when you start to ask questions about it.
