To judge a book by its cover is to see the truth of the world; to read the first page is to be moral.

Publishing houses like Penguin have attained cult followings because they have something worth following. Distinctive orange covers, universal to nearly all of their titles, are much more eye-catching than those of the typical Harlequin romance novel: an all-too-predictable image of the he-man embracing the girl, accompanied by large text heralding some over-used phrase that’s supposed to act as a title. (I have indeed seen exponentially many more coffee mugs bearing a Penguin-esque rendering of Nineteen Eighty-Four or Wuthering Heights, than any exhibiting one of the 1,000+ selections published by the latter each year.) As a result, Penguin’s sales are consistent, whereas Harlequin faces uncertain terrain with every passing year, each of which could potentially be its last.

People are like books. Some are nice, yet look cheap; some are cheap, yet look nice; and some are decidedly nice or cheap.

One of the greatest truths one can discover about the world is that every single human has their own story to tell, so much richer and mind-bending than any that an author can concoct within the relative limitations of the brain. (The opening paragraph of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story, “A Case of Identity,” is likely what enlightened me to this school of thinking:)

‘…life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.’

Unfortunately, the human consciousness parallels these substances—books and people—without us truly knowing. We exist in a ruthless world filled with first impressions and prejudice: from race to gender to age to size to wealth to sexual orientation—these are matters of fact, no matter where they may lie on one’s political and moral spectrums.

Teachers and parents only tell children the overused cliché, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” to ingrain an undeveloped sense of compassion. The fact of the matter is, people do, indeed, judge books by their covers, for better or for worse. People’s stories are often subject to atrocities that ruin the rest of their story, yet they are worth reading; likewise, those people whose lives seem a wreck, until a certain event that transforms them forever, are worth reading.

There is only so much we can do: that it is humanly impossible to demolish every last sentiment of injustice around the world, destroy every last book cover so that people can only see a novel’s contents. Any effort to do so would be pointless, and would certainly take with it the variety of people and culture from all around the world which makes life worth living. Nonetheless, it is necessary that each of us, individually, peek inside to the first chapter, and it well may be that you’ll be sucked into the rest of the story.