Never judge a book by its cover

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Last Update: October 2024

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William Raynar, regular contributor to FOLIO , examines the everyday covers that catch us out - from the worlds of crime to culture - and the trouble with stereotypes

In Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, the young aristocrat gets away with everything: cruelty, betrayal, even death. Confronted by James Vane, brother of the woman he destroyed, Dorian laughs: “Take me to the light and look at my face.” And in the light, James Vane sees only a boy of twenty. Too young, too beautiful, too innocent to be guilty. Dorian Gray walked free on nothing but his face.

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A century later, Brigitte Bardot sang Noir et blanc. She stripped to show her flawless white body, and the world admired. But when she opened her heart, the words fell like a slap: Et lorsque j’ai ouvert mon cœur / Il était noir à l’intérieur. The outside was adored. The inside was despicable. Beauty excuses everything, until it doesn’t.

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There’s a scene in Bong Joon-ho’s crime-thriller film, Memories of Murder. An inspector boasts he can always tell a criminal just by looking into his eyes. Another officer challenges him: between two men, one the rapist of a girl, the other her father, can he tell which is which? The inspector hesitates and so does the audience. The genius of Bong is that he denies us an answer because we don’t deserve one. To give it would only flatter our instinct to judge by appearances and let those who guessed right believe they had the ability to see the truth.

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*In this image, one individual is a convicted serial killer while the other was wrongfully accused of committing crimes. The 'halos and horns' effect shows how a face doesn't always fit the crime.*

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Covers matter but only because we let them. They come in every shape. Some covers are handsome, like American serial killer Ted Bundy who lured victims with charm, or Josef Mengele (dubbed the “angel of death”), a physician with movie-star looks who conducted inhumane medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. Others appear respectable, such as Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling in their boardrooms at Enron who were convicted of corporate fraud. Or financier Bernie Madoff with his Upper East Side life of golf and philanthropy, the criminal mastermind behind the largest known Ponzi scheme in history.

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Some covers are blonde. Elizabeth Holmes, for instance, the biotech founder of failed blood testing start-up, or Anna Delvey, who convinced New York's elite she was a German heiress with her couture dresses and Instagram feed. Others, such as former comedian and actor Bill Cosby, are family men or geniuses like the Oscar-winning producer Harvey Weinstein. On the outside: charm, wealth, beauty, normality. On the inside: monsters, predators, crooks, fraudsters.

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We don’t like being caught off guard when the person letting you in at the reception is dressed as a host and not as a waiter. When the “junior” on the call turns out to be the decision-maker. When a teacher looks younger than their students. We cultivate stereotypes because they save us time. They tell us who’s who before anyone opens their mouth. We like the butcher, the baker, the cook, the priest to look the part. Aprons, hats, collars. It keeps the world tidy. We’re unsettled by a footballer without tattoos. We expect an optician to wear glasses but we’d find it odd if the hearing-aid salesman were deaf. In the collective imagination, a terrorist has dark hair and a messy beard. Anything else doesn’t fit the poster. Eminem doesn’t look like a rapper. Drake does.

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The start-up founder with the hoodie is already ubiquitous, so now the look has evolved to sustainable chic: sneakers, recycled materials, hair unkempt enough to signal creativity but not neglect.

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In business, we also judge by the cover. Only the covers have changed. The clichés of the 80s and 90s, the pinstripe banker and the shouting trader, feel like museum pieces. Today’s stereotypes are harder to see because they’re less uniform, but we still apply them. Today we have the global CEO who insists on being “human”: tieless, approachable, giving TED-talk smiles while never actually saying anything. The start-up founder with the hoodie is already ubiquitous, so now the look has evolved to sustainable chic: sneakers, recycled materials, hair unkempt enough to signal creativity but not neglect. The woman leader walking the tightrope — strong but not “too strong”, warm but not “too warm”, a cover she never asked for, but one the world insists she wear.

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Covers don’t stop at individuals; we project them onto couples too. Put a beautiful younger woman next to an older man and we rush to write the script: he must be rich, she must be venal. No evidence needed. The world went ballistic applying this stereotype to Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s Venetian wedding. The narrative was easy, too easy. Few paused to consider her long career as a journalist, pilot, entrepreneur. She was judged almost entirely on her appearance. The cover was read, the judgement passed and the book closed. In truth, the real cover on display was not hers but ours: a laziness and willingness to skim rather than to truly look.

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Covers matter. We like them neat. We like them legible. We like them to save us the trouble. When they don’t, we stall. We don’t read past the first page, not because we can’t but because we don’t want to.

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In this article

Written by

William Raynar

Thematic Research Specialist

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