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 the books and try to think of which to check off the bundle. I spend hours like that. Suddenly I realise that I haven't even picked up a book and read it's synopsis. I was judging them by their 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, although 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 shorts 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 coloured pages.

I remember reading about this in "The Clothing of Books" by Jhumpa Lahiri where she talks about personal experiences with clothing 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.

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 it's contents and more of the author's name and so of the book.

That's something that's common in Italy, France, Germany and other European countries where the cover of the books are similar in color and outlook but every content differs. Some book covers don't have the calibre to carry the artistic weight of books. They are more of a marketing technique or a money making process out of indelible work.

I walk out of the store empty handed thinking, what if books didn't have covers?

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