Getting to design your own book cover is the sort of ultimately maddening power that probably shouldn’t be entrusted to vain mortals. It’s a little like getting to choose your own face. What kind of face would best express your inner self? Maybe more important, what kind of face will make other people like or respect or want to sleep with you? Do these two hypothetical faces bear any resemblance to each other? Can you imagine a face that would combine their best features?

There’s often an embarrassing disconnect between how people try to present themselves and how they’re actually perceived, which is why they ask their friends to tell them honestly how they look in something—and why publishing houses hire professional designers for books’ covers and allow their authors very little say over them. Most writers are given what’s called “consultation” on their covers, which means that when they’re shown their cover designs they try not to cry right in front of their editors. But, because I’m a cartoonist as well as an essayist, and also have a savvy and implacable agent whose will is not to be opposed, I had “approval” over the cover of my book, which meant that I got to make a tiresome and nit-picky pest of myself.

I had what we’ll call a constructive dialogue with my publisher’s editorial, design, and marketing teams, finding a balance between my personal vision and something people might possibly want to buy. For months we went back and forth: I’d send them several illustration options and they’d pick whichever one I liked least; they’d send me some design options, I’d pick the one that made me least unhappy, and they’d veto it. Book covers are an important sales tool, and the marketing department felt, quite reasonably, that the cover was very much their business. I also had a paranoid sense of shadowy, Olympian forces weighing in from farther above; I’ve been told that the most powerful figures in the current literary world, the buyers for the major national bookstore chains, have been known to offer to increase their orders for a book if its cover is changed.

Perhaps to get rid of me for a while, my editor dispatched me on a research mission: to go to a bookstore, survey the covers of other literary nonfiction books, and report back to her about which ones I liked, and why.

The main principles of design—in books, appliances, cars, clothing, everything—are:

Your product must be bold and eye-catching and conspicuously different from everyone else’s, but Not too much!

Which is why the covers of most contemporary books all look disturbingly the same, as if inbred. It seems as if sixty-five per cent of all novels’ jackets feature an item of female apparel and/or part of the female anatomy and the name of some foodstuff in the title—the book-cover equivalent of the generic tough-guy-with-gun movie poster with title like “2 HARD & 2 FAST.” There’s clearly some brutally efficient Darwinian process at work here, because certain images—half-faces, napes, piers stretching into the water—spread like successful evolutionary adaptations and quickly become ubiquitous. Covers of essay collections, to which I paid particular attention, fall into three categories:

Nothing but text, usually on a white background. A single object, presumably some visual synecdoche for the book’s subject or theme, set against a white background (the template here is every cover by Malcolm Gladwell, from the match on “The Tipping Point” through the sneaker on “What the Dog Saw”). The face of the author, which indicates either (a) a brand-name celebrity writer (e.g., Vonnegut, Thompson, Hitchens), or (b) a self-promoting media personality (e.g., Chelsea Whatshername, that “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” guy, the latest photogenic authoress of a memoir in the time-honored I-screwed a-lot-of-guys-and-what-I-learned-from-it genre).

The single-object-on-white-background cover has become such a recognizable formula that there is now a Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator. My favorite variations on this type are the Vintage editions of Nabokov (the best is the title “Speak, Memory” partially obscured by a piece of translucent wax paper). But most essay collections look boringly alike, victims of a current fashion in cover design that, like the latest generation state-of-the-art C.G.I. or lumberjack beards on skinny hipsters, will look embarrassingly dated in a decade or two.

This outing made me ask myself: When was the last time I was really entranced and drawn in by a book cover? Although the covers of my favorite books are dear to me by association—even the drab academic cover of Vintage’s “Beyond Good and Evil,” with its scab/lint/mucus palette, carries a kind of dark illicit charge for me, the same way the inert, clunky silhouette of the Fat Man atom bomb holds its quiet kilotons—I can’t remember the last cover that caught my eye in a store and caused me to pick up, read around in, and ultimately buy the book.

Around the same time I was fretting over my cover, my nephew turned thirteen, and, in honor of his entry into this dweebiest and most introverted of life’s stages, I gave him a variety pack/starter kit of science fiction’s greatest hits, all original paperbacks with evocative midcentury cover illustrations. Looking at these old sci-fi covers, with their jewellike colors and cryptic, sinister imagery, made me remember the weird thrill I felt when I first saw them as a teen.