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The book cover is a place which unites two worlds, the commercial world and that of the text. It is a door which advertises an imaginary place beyond, and a threshold across which the reader is brought. This colloquia draws together a range of perspectives from different countries and cultures. Speakers will examine how the book cover entices the reader into the book though imagery, irony, representation of place.

1) Val Williamson: Relocating Liverpool in the 1990s through the covers of regional saga fiction. The growing prominence of regional sagas in fastseller lists significantly increased the commercial importance of women authors in British publishing in the 1990s.

2) Susan Pickford: The rhetorical function of negative cover blurbs: a French edition of Jerome K Jerome's Three men in a Boat. Pickford will look particularly at the use of the negative blurb on the Flammarion pocket edition of Trois hommes dans un bateau — as a marketing tool, a way of undermining the canon and siding with the mass reading public.

3) Miriam Rivett: A case study of the Gossip Girl series. Rivett will reflect on the move from a producer-led approach to the commissioning and production of titles to a more specific consumer-orientated approach as reflected in book covers of a children's fiction series.

4) Sari Kawana: Don't Wed Without It: The Magic of Book Design and Prewar Japanese Publishing Industry. Kawana will focus on the role of book designers in promoting mass-market editions of various "complete works of Japanese literature" in early twentieth century Japan.

5) Alexis Weedon (chair) will tie together some of the previous discussions by using books which have already been mentioned in the colloquia as case studies in the use of the virtual cover image.

Stream: Books, Writing and Reading, Publishing

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

She has published Victorian Publishing (Aldershot: Ashgate 2003) and British Book Trade Archives 1830-1939: A Location Register co-authored with Michael Bott (Bristol and Oxford: HOBODS, 1996). Since 1995 she has co-edited the academic journal Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 1995. She has published articles on the British publishing industry and is currently researching the media reception and internet presence of books on the web from World Book Day to Amazon. She teaches on the masters and undergraduate courses in the areas of media, publishing and journalism at the University of Luton.