Yeah, I know. We’re not supposed to judge by them, but sometimes I wonder if the artist doing the book cover has bothered to read even the first five pages of the manuscript. Other times, I wonder why the artist doesn’t get more credit for their brilliant communication of the contents.
On the good side, was the cover for Anne Rice’s The Mummy. The original cover was a fairly boring Egyptian design, but this one captures the gothic suspense Rice used to be so good at.
On the bad side is Barbara Hambly’s Dog Wizard, a favorite of mine. The trouble is, the main character, Antryg Windrose, is described as tall, lanky as a stork, with a crop of curly grey hair, coke bottle glasses, and layers of clothing that make him look like a refugee from Haight-Ashbury. NOT, I’d like to point out, a mighty-thewed, blonde haired Fabian look-alike in golden armor. Also, the creature he was fighting, the tsaeti, started off as a ghost possessed by a demon and ended up as a huge moving glob of blood, mud, limbs, slime, and whatever else it had absorbed along the way - NOT like an overgrown warthog with an attitude problem.
sigh
It isn’t just me, is it? It seems like the bad covers far outnumber the good covers. Is it that the artists don’t get to read the manuscripts anymore? Michael Whelan always seemed to nail his depictions. Do the publishers just pick the worst ones of the bunch?
Don’t know if there are any children’s lit fans out there, but you can pretty much always count on a new release Dianna Wynne Jones to have a shitty cover.
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn is another nice cover because no two letters are exactly the same. And the book is about freaks.
To me the worst covers are those that match movie posters. A movie comes out and the book that the movie is based on is re-released with the same cover as the movie poster. I can’t stand that. I like the old covers. If I get interested in a book after seeing it’s movie, I’ll go to a used bookstore to find the book with it’s old cover instead of it’s movie tie-in.
High on my list of bad covers is Carrie Alexander’s Three Little Words. I’ll admit it, it’s a Harlequin SuperRomance so it isn’t like one should expect a great cover neccessarily, but that one annoys me tremendously. The book takes place on the Upper Pennisula of Michigan, along the shore of Lake Superior. The hero buys a lighthouse and restores it. The book cover depicts a lighthouse. Probably the best known Lake Superior Lighthouse. Split Rock Lighthouse.
Split Rock Lighthouse is located on the north shore of Lake Superior, yes. But it is NOT located in Michigan. It is located in Minnesota. I’ve been there several times. It is a very nice looking light house*. NOTHING in the book that describes the lighthouse makes one think that the author intended it to look just like Split Rock’s. but that isn’t the real problem. The real problem as I see it is that Split Rock has a very distinctive rock formation underneath it. Include that so you get the classic look associated with Split rock and it is inappropriate for use with a lighthouse in Michigan. (Because I know it is a State Park, I’d have a problem with it in a book set in Minnesota, but I might be willing to suspend disbelief. Not for a book set in Michigan).
*Funny story about this light house. A couple of years ago, Reader’s Digest put a picture of Split Rock Lighthouse on the cover. A few months later, someone wrote in and asked whether that picture was based on a certain Thomas Kinkade lighthouse picture. The Editor responded respectfully, but pointed out that Kinkade got his inspiration from the exsisting lighthouse.
The Pratchett books that Harper Prism sell here in the US have nondescript, lifeless covers. For example, the Thief of Time has a clock, and The Fifth Elephant has gasp a small drawing of an elephant.
The ones I bought from the UK have the superb Josh Kirby illustrated covers.
I’m so not observant. I’ve had Geek Love since it was published and never noticed the difference in the letters. :smack:
I also didn’t notice until someone pointed it out to me that if you lay Stephen King’s Desperation and Regulators side by side, the two jackets make one picture.
I think covers should reflect the quality of what’s inside. That didn’t happen with Feesters in the Lake by Bob Leman. The stories are 100% outstanding, some of the best SF, fantasy and horror I’ve ever had the pleasure to read, but if I was judging by the cover, I’d never have bought the book.
I don’t know how to bring just that image over, so if you want to see this truly ugly cover, go here – darksidepress.com and scroll down (past the other ugly covers) to the one with the green letters where the mutant hillbilly is crawling out of the pond.
Amazon has the book too, but it’s No Image Available. And for good reason.
The SFWA private message board just had a long, long thread about cover art horror stories.
The simple truth is that editors think they know what covers will sell and tell the artist to draw them. What’s inside the book has little to no bearing on the issue.
I didn’t notice it until reading this old interview with Dunn and she mentioned her reasons for liking the new cover. I then looked at the book and thought, “Oh yeah, no two letters are the same. So that’s why they look so weird.”
I don’t really have a favorite as I don’t pay that much attention to book covers overall except to not whether they look good or not (I’m bad about literally judging a book by its cover) but there is one type of book cover I especially hate – any kind that is based on the movie or TV adaptation of the book or has some sort of blurb on it about how it’s “Now a #1 blockbuster from Paramount Pictures!” or something similar.
I refuse to buy copies like that and if I cannot find one with original artwork, will not buy that book at all.
Yeah, pretty anal, I know, but you have to pick your battles and this is one of mine.
I love the paperback cover of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. In fact, one of the main reasons I bought the book in the first place was because I liked the cover. It fits the story perfectly. The back cover, which is styled after an old newspaper, is perfect as well.
I like the stylish black and yellow coloring of this version of On the Road, too.
I can’t find a picture of it, but the yellow hardback cover of Joseph Heller’s Something Happened is downright hideous.
I’ve always thought the original cover or Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed was spectacularly ugly. The color scheme and the generic picture of a moon (albeit a large one) on the horizon. :eek:
OTOH, many years ago, I had a book on the rise of Naziism. The cover was red with four black bars radiating outward, strongly suggesting a swastika without actually showing one on the cover.
Diana Wynne Jones’s books have beautiful covers here. The Merlin Conspiracy was simply gorgeous.
Illustrators don’t always get the m/s to read. Often they just get instructions from the editor as Exapno says. It’s really disheartening to get cover proofs and think WTF? I’ve known situations where the editor refuses to tell the illustrator or the author who the other is, just to make sure they don’t talk to each other.
BTW, my favorite cover of all time has nothing but text on it.
The book is the 1954 Pocket Book paperback edition of You Shall Know Them by the French novelist Vercors.
It has a blue band across the middle with the title and author. Above and below the band, in giant yellow letters on a black background, are the words:
The latest printings of Tom Clancy’s novels have had covers that don’t match the story. IIRC, the cover of Clear and Present Danger had an aircraft on it that wasn’t even in the book and Debt of Honor had a similar problem. In some of these novels the military machinery is quite important but it should at least match some aspect of the story.
Among the best: The Burning Man cover for Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 – a perfect image for the book itself, and also a pleasing bit of intertextuality, referring to the John Tenniel’s illustration in Through The Looking Glass. Nice that the last thing Alice says to the paper man is “I don’t belong to this railway journey at all – I was in a wood just now – and I wish I could get back there,” and of course Montag ends up following the railway tracks to the Book People, where he is introduced to the ambulatory edition of Through the Looking Glass. Very cool.
I once saw a very, very old paperback copy of The Hunt for Red October…I think this was the cover, but it’s too small to be sure. If it has a fairly crude cartoon of a control panel on it somewhere, it’s the one.
The “Movie poster cover,” for once, looks a hell of a lot better. (Forgive me, Aesiron.)
I’ve always hated the first paperback cover to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (large image in link). Most of the other covers to his Ender Saga is the same.
There are new bookcovers that came out that are geared towards children, which are slightly better. It just seems to me that most of the covers with Card’s Ender/Bean Sagas are rather lame (of course some of the later books in the Bean saga are lame, but that’s for another thread).
There was an artist doing paperback covers in the 1960s who did these covers showing blobby, melted figures and shapes with a horizon grid showing, or strongly implied, which were just incredible. I liked them more than the representative covers of later years because, far more than the representative covers, they conveyed a sense of wonder, of “Anything might happen here.”
Best. SF. Covers. Ever.
Worst would have to be all those fantasy covers of some guy with a sword and a dragon. Totally generic.
Exapno - I bet you can relate to this: one of the reasons I collect first editions is because of the dust jacket art. Some of the originals are just wonderful - I can’t search right now, but the Great Gatsby’s original dj is pretty much the best one ever (and no, I don’t have a 1st; in dj, they are topping $150K by now…). Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises and Farewell to Arms are just lovely, too. In Terms of Sci-Fi, I love Asimov’s I, Robot (big hulking Iron Giant-like Robot on a field of dark red) and Brave New World (wonderful Art Deco drawing of a plane circling the globe, done in navy blue and white - style for days).
In terms of the worst -I have to go with book covers from the '70’s. There was a trend where the 1st edition dj just had a plain, 1-color field, with the Author’s name and then the title (big risk taking designers sometimes switched the order). That’s it - yuck. Sophie’s Choice, Garp, Gore Vidal’s books like Lincoln and Burr, etc. Bo-ring.
