I love books! And although I own many digital books on my Kindle (merely because I don’t have a library or big enough house to accommodate them), I still love the real thing. I rarely pass a bookshop without browsing.

My local coffee shop Jaffe & Neale is also an independent book shop which means an Americano inevitably becomes an expensive thing, as I find it hard to resist leaving without a book under my arm.

As a designer I’ve designed book covers, but it still doesn’t stop me being suckered in to buying a good looking book, regardless of the content therein. To avoid unwanted purchases, particularly with fiction, I now open up the first page to see after the opening lines, if it’s a book that grabs me – does it make me want to turn the page. I thought, maybe there’s an idea to this. What if the first few lines of the opening chapter were printed on the spine? I dummied up a few classics to test the theory.