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Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Rhian Waller | Postcolonial Pictures 43 of time ensuring a cover is commercially palatable and has ‘shelf appeal’, often by foregrounding images that are engaging and aesthetically-pleasing. It is likely members of a publishing team, however carefully they assemble the elements of a book cover, operate on a basis of the “gut” feeling articulated by Harrison (2003). Some images will be instinctively understood to ‘work’, while others will not. The main drivers for aesthetic choices in cover design revolve around marketing, as the cover has become a powerful and increasingly sophisticated promotional tool (Drew and Sternberger, 2005). The book cover is a multimodal semiotic artefact that uti- lises a “tight coupling” (Horn, 1999: 27) of textual and image-based signifiers. In other words, paratextual features such as a title, subtitle, logo and cover quotes couple with the main image, frequently a photograph or artwork, to form a macro-sign. The title contextualises the image, while the image supports the title. These integral signifiers, therefore, can be viewed indivi- dually and as part of a whole. Genette describes the role of these elements, particularly title and subtitle text, as to “desi- gnate, to indicate subject matter, to tempt the public” (2009: 76). Although considered the least significant functions by Genette, the latter two are key concern here. In terms of indication and temptation, what is supposed to be signified by the cover is the book-as-product, and, by extension, the implied quality, desirability and distinctiveness of that product, as well as an indication of content. Sonzogni (2011) describes this as an act of “visual translation”, wherein the narrative is reinterpreted into image-signs. Cover appeal is, to a degree, culturally determined. As Salmani and Eghtesadi point out, just as the text of a translated book undergoes adjustment to fit the “social and ideological factors […] dominant in the tar- get society”, the cover will likewise be adjusted (2015). These social and ideological factors are present at the design stage of first publication — the process of translation only renders these phenomena more visible. The profit imperative may drive graphic and aesthetic choices, but the resulting images carry more meaning than the intended commercial signification. As Kress and van Leeuwin note, “meanings belong to culture, rather than specific semiotic modes” (2006: 3), and, likewise, visual language, too, is “culturally specific” (p.4) and encodes “cultural values” (Kourdis, 2013). With this in mind, it is possible the commercial and western context of particular book cover design may lead to aspects of neoliberal capitalist ideology, as well as cultural stereotypes and clichés, being encoded in the cover itself. A book’s cover and content are not objective mirrors of reality, or even straightforward subjective records of what the traveller observes. Instead, they are intensely multi-subjective, as they are assembled by the artist(s) or photographer and graphic designer(s) subject to multiple level of oversight through the publishing hierarchy, and they are intended to reflect the text and its subjectivities. Any visual semiotic analysis must pivot on this understanding. The Politics of Travel Writing and Postcolonialism: A Very Brief Overview Travel writing, by its nature, depends on the author encoding and the reader decoding cross- cultural signs, which opens up multiple avenues of understanding. As a result, signs encoded by the author may be interpreted in various ways; some meanings are understood by broad audiences, while others may be buried. Covert subjectivities, as when a writer encodes their subtle colonialist views, can be problematic, but, because of their embedded nature, the signi-