"Yet, I have come to distrust book jackets calculated to prick desire like a Bloomingdale's window, as if you could wear what you read."

- Sharon Schwartz

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I ENTER the Crossword store closest to my house in Pune. It's a very small bookstore, almost like an indie one.

The interior is as yellow as it gets, with yellowish bookshelves and thin dark yellow walls. The ceiling lights are white that feeds the silhouette of the room. This is literally like every other Crossword store but smaller; the smell of books everywhere, and at the top of every shelf, is a black and white picture of world-renowned Indian authors like Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdi, Chetan Bhagat, Arundhati Roy and so on.

I haven't planned a book yet. So I just walk around through the fiction and poetry section browsing for a book while the worker at the store kept giving me side-eyes as if I were to pick a book and run away.

I run my hands along with the books and try to think of which to check off the bundle. I spend hours like that.

Suddenly I realize that I haven't even picked up a book and read it's synopsis. I was judging them by their covers. There were many books with catchy titles, but lame covers. Not a lot of them looked very pretty, but some of them had very fancy covers. The fancy books even looked expensive.

It reminded me of the time I once ignored "Twenty Love Poems and A Song Of Despair" by Pablo Neruda just because of its simplistic cover of a faceless naked man whose knee is folded in towards his chin. However, today it is one of the best books I've ever read. I cast the book away from the list of books I had picked up, just like the Dean of my college once threw me out because I wore a three-fourth short to exams. But I never faced this problem in libraries, where almost every book is of the base brown, black and blue color with cream-colored pages.

I remember reading about this in "The Clothing of Books" by Jhumpa Lahiri, where she talks about her personal experiences with clothing and bullying and how the same thing is suffered by books.

I also read a blog where the writer keeps telling the reader that a cover should be an interpreter of the contents but, at the same time, mysterious and attractive. And it made me feel like book covers are more seductive than artistic.

As a dedicated reader, how will I know or understand a book without really looking into it? How will the cover determine the journey that a book is? Is the book jacket a good roadmap for the experience that it bears from within?

But what if book covers had no artistic base? There wouldn't be any fancy attractive covers. There won't be any type of judgement towards reading. The book would give away less of its contents and more of the author's name and so of the book.

That's common in Italy, France, Germany, India, and other European countries where the cover of the books are similar in color and outlook but are arranged according to different publishers. Some book covers don't have the caliber to carry the artistic weight of books. They are more of a marketing technique or money-making process out of indelible work.

The idea of different books having the same type of simplistic, unicolor covers, is that it feels and seems protected. It's ideas, specificities don't reflect on the cover, and hence, there's the mystery.

Books that have similar dimensions or that have a very sober, less seductive quality are also excellent. There are many phenomenal bestsellers and critically acclaimed books that only gained such success after changing their book covers into something more alluring, or I dare say, bewitching.

But I feel like my appetite is dead for books with brilliant covers and since I don't find any books with boring outfits, I walk out of the store empty-handed thinking, what if books didn't have covers?

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