Ask any bookseller what their least favorite part of a physical book is, and you’ll get a long thought-out opinion on how much they hate something like deckled edges, French flaps, partial dust jackets, or some weird binding technique that the average person has never heard of. We see trends come and go, whether it be a subgenre or a style of cover design, and now there’s a new kid oversaturating the market: The sprayed edge.
Sprayed edges have gone from making occasional appearances on (mostly) fantasy shelves to infecting every fiction section aimed at readers above the age of seven. Before the relative boom we have been subjected to over the last 18 months or so, these design choices were generally reserved for special editions of titles that had been picked up by book boxes like FairyLoot and Illumicrate. While they are patient zero of the plague that we are now faced with, they create the only books with sprayed edges that I don’t immediately have an issue with. They are completely separate from the brick-and-mortar retail market made up of Barnes & Noble—large exacerbators of the sprayed edge problem—and indie bookstores, and despite the popularity of their product leading to a lot of the issues discussed here, they have consistently stayed in their lane when it comes to reaching consumers via the online market. It is the publishers that have decided to cut out the middleman and take sprayed edges directly to in-person consumers that are the problem, not them.
Sprayed edges signal a kind of false value to items in the book market, and it’s not like we have not seen this happen before in other media industries. Comic books faced a similar era of false uniqueness in the 90s (it is so easy to find an unopened copy of Death of Superman these days), so it is more than fair to apply the philosophy that “no one is special if everyone is” to the sprayed edge boom. Because this type of book design blew up as BookTok became more and more popular—who wouldn’t want to show off a fancy, limited edition copy of their favorite book? —publishers got into the business of slapping a design on the edges of any book that had even a wisp of potential at some point within the last 18 months.
I counted almost 20 distinct new titles that were coming out with sprayed edges during the first week of May, and I work in a relatively small independent bookstore. Barnes & Noble pushes sprayed edges harder than anyone else via their exclusive editions, and there is no doubt in my mind that larger stores with more inventory space received even more books with the same trait. At the most basic level, sprayed edges serve as a false flag of popularity—after so many years of seeing them on editions of books that have earned that kind of success, whether it be through pure sales or a cult following, it isn’t surprising that every publisher that could afford to produce books with sprayed edges has decided to do so.
But as annoying as all that is, there’s nothing inherently wrong with using visual marketing to try and coax people into buying something. That’s what covers are for, after all. The issue is that as sprayed edges have become more popular, the production of them has become increasingly lazy, both in design and quality. When Iron Flame was released, I unpacked books that smelled like fresh spray paint and watched as copy after copy chipped and were left with white spots because of overspraying. When If We We Villains was reissued as a paperback with red edges, I had to dig through the box and sort out multiple copies of other books that had been stained by the pain during the shipping process.
Even if the books are successfully painted without any major technical issues, the quality of the paint manufacturers are using is seemingly going down. I can say with confidence that the paint used to produce the Barnes & Noble exclusive edition of Bloodmarked—the second book in Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn Cycle—was higher quality than what was used when it was time to produce the exclusive edition of Legendborn a year later. On a wider scale, monochrome, designless sprayed edges have started to appear on mystery and literary fiction titles for no reason that I or any other bookseller I know can discern. There are cases where this choice can make sense–Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar comes to mind, or Lol Tolhurst’s Goth: A History on the nonfiction side of things–but that is almost never the case.
These issues are not exclusive to the adult market. Books aimed at middle-grade level readers are the latest victims of the sprayed edge industrial complex, and while adults may be fawning over a random sprayed edge on a book they have never read before, kids are not. Young adult literature is subject to the insidious rise of “deluxe editions” of books that come with sprayed edges and nothing extra inside for an extra $3-6 on the price tag. Doing something like that for a 10-year anniversary edition of a book is fine (there should still be something extra inside), but to do so at the same time as a “standard” edition is released is absolutely criminal, especially when children have no way of making their own money. The “deluxe edition” problem appears in the adult market as well, most prominently in the case of Onyx Storm, where customers could order the less expensive standard edition at the same time as the sprayed edge deluxe edition, only to learn that the standard edition would not be released until weeks after the deluxe edition.
This isn’t to advocate for the complete elimination of sprayed edges across the board. Certain special editions are very well done, and I, very selfishly, would like to be able to complete the many matching sets of books that will inevitably make up my Legendborn collection by the time the series is finished (we all have our vices).
It is, however, to say that the manufactured ferality around sprayed edges is the most useless, annoying, and somehow messy thing that I have experienced in my time as a bookseller, and while my many colleagues across the industry have certainly faced worse, I have yet to meet a bookseller who is not tired of seeing sprayed edges on every other book that comes into existence. I’m sure that back when images on covers were becoming more and more popular, some people felt this way about that change as well, but covers serve a purpose that sprayed edges will never be able to. Chances are, you’ll never know a book even has a sprayed edge until you take it off the shelf because no one is shelving a book edges outward, so if publishers really wanted to draw readers in, they would come up with a new way to market books that didn’t involve getting paint residue everywhere.
Selah Jordan is a science fiction and fantasy bookseller who has a deep appreciation for good book design. Find her in your local bookstore doing the Sisyphean task of facing all of the spines to the front of the shelf after a parent has let their small child shove every book they can reach into the back of it.
