Book covers are turning into works of art. See how it’s done

“Twenty-five years ago, book cover design was barely an industry,” says Bena Sareen. She is currently the consulting creative director at Aleph Book Company in Delhi. But when the millennium turned, she was Penguin India’s first art director. It was a good time to be in publishing. In 1997, Arundhati Roy’s The God Of Small Things won the Booker Prize. Kids and adults were delighting in the first magical adventures of Harry Potter. And the very first Crossword Book Award, India’s first major prize for writers, was given out in 1998.