Whatever it might contain inside, a book is an object, and often what we see for the first time is the cover. Publishers know that the potential buyer can be attracted to a book subjectively (unconsciously) by imagery; the covers on the new Karnac series use paintings, presumably to give the reader an idea or feeling of what the book is about.

The painting on the cover of this book is called ‘Composition’ yet evokes not so much order and balance as a train crash or state of acute indigestion and/or terror. Whoever was involved in choosing the image may have unwittingly revealed something of the contradictoriness of the book's contents. Karnac are now including a photograph of the author, which seems to be an American tradition to make the book more ‘personal’. Michael Eigen, who is probably less well known in this country than