The National Mental Coach of the Netherlands – Wim de Bie – recently visited Zutphen (‘book-city Zutphen’) to ask and answer the question ‘how do you choose a book?’.

De Bie proves once again that you can judge a book by its cover: the back cover as well as the front one. After a tour through some typically dodgy examples (gold-blocked, author’s name in huge letters, and so on), he comes to a wonderfully sober example that puts no pressure on its possible readers. It’s a book published by Van Oorschot, and, as he points out, the cover was designed, with nice lettering, by Gerrit Noordzij. The cover design matches and guarantees the good content inside. Only in the Netherlands could one find such a discussion on a national, state-sponsored new-media platform; only the Dutch would put themselves into the hands of this enlightened mental coach.