Thoughts on Books and Tea Parties

In his usual stylish fashion, J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet socks it to ‘em with a trenchant post on death, taxes and book covers:

I’ve been waiting for months to post this book jacket. And I could hardly have picked a better day than this: April 15, aka Tax Day in the United States. While political right-wingers and FOX News talking heads, upset at President Barack Obama’s campaign to repair the sour U.S. economy left behind by his predecessor, gather in ragtag “Tea Parties” at various points around the country to protest progressive taxation, government spending, the supposedly detrimental ideas students are taught in college (as if ignorance were really bliss), and the general fact that one of their own isn’t in charge anymore, everybody else will be filing their tax forms or feeling smug that they already completed that annual deed weeks ago.

The title of this book comes, of course, from a saying attributed to U.S. Founding Father Benjamin Franklin: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” However, Franklin makes no appearance in the novel.

Pierce’s full post is predictably engaging and it’s here.

Do you just love that cover to death? There’s more where that came from. Pierce has been collecting them at his Killer Covers blog. Along with -- you guess it -- still more trenchant observations. Kill Covers is a must stop because, as the blog tells us, “it’s what’s upfront that counts.”

Annual Book Show Picks the Best

We’re sorry not to have been able to get to the 23rd New York Book Show last Monday, the 24th of March. Nearly 600 publishers, writers, book production personnel, book manufacturers and guests descended on the Grand Ballroom at the Manhattan Center on West 34th Street. The stars of the show were the 170 winning books, jackets and covers. With so many winners, we won’t list them all, but you can see them on the Show’s Web site.

The New York Book Show is sponsored annually by the Bookbinders’ Guild of New York. While the Book Show is the highlight of the organization’s year, they are an active group with interests in both literacy and the art of the book. You can learn more about the Guild, including how to apply for membership, here.

Your Coverage May Vary

One of the things you’ll have noticed if you spend much time either here or at our sister publication, The Rap Sheet, is that we give a lot of thought to book covers. This is especially true over at The Rap Sheet, where editor J. Kingston Pierce has turned the whole matter into something of a fine art.

So it was with some amusement today that I came across this short piece on the Abe Books Web site entitled “30 Novels Worth Buying For the Cover Alone.”

And are they? Well, you decide. Personally, there is no book I would buy simply because I thought the cover was good. (Even though, on the author side of things, I consider myself very lucky because my publisher does a killer job on the covers of my books.)

In fairness, though, some of the books included in Abe Books’ 30 would be worth reading even with stinky covers. Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for example. Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (although I must admit I’ve seen it with covers I like better than the one shown here.)

In any case, if you think it’s fun to see what books others think are well covered, the piece is worth a peek. (And a peek is all you’ll need here: it’s very brief. Not much reading required.)

Still hankering to revel in the art of the book covers? Pay attention to anything J. Kingston Pierce has written on the topic. It’s turned into something of a hobby for him. He even recently developed a blog called Killer Covers (“Because it’s What’s Up Front That Counts”). Also, check out his ongoing -- and engaging -- series on copycat covers. It’s astonishing. As well, for the last couple of years, he’s been rounding up the very best in crime fiction covers and asking readers to vote on same.

We’ve Got It Covered

It’s no secret that J. Kingston Pierce, January Magazine’s senior editor, as well as primary perpetrator of The Rap Sheet, has a thing for covers.

Not long after we launched The Rap Sheet as a standalone publication back into 2006, Pierce began his campaign of holding copycat covers up to the light. All of those articles are vastly entertaining, and are collected here.

In 2007, it seemed somewhat natural when this passion for all things coverlicious led to Pierce collecting the best of the covers he’d encountered during the year and allowing readers to add in their two cents. Yesterday on The Rap Sheet, Pierce unveiled the covers he figures are this year’s best from the world of crime fiction:

Several of us have been keeping track of the artwork that has graced this genre’s book jackets over the last 12 months, and we have finally winnowed down (from an original set of some three dozen candidates) what we believe are the 12 most distinguished covers produced in 2008. Undoubtedly, there will be readers who disagree with our selections, and say that other choices should have been made. Indeed, those of us who put this list together pushed our individual sets of contenders, and in the end none of us got everything he or she wanted. A few nominees were especially hard to set aside, but in the end, we arrived at a rundown of book jackets that work well in terms of artwork, typography, and message.

If you’d like have a peek and add your own vote, you may do so here.

Copycat Covers Continues

More than two years into his crusade to suss out and expose all the duplicate covers in bookdom, Rap Sheet and January Magazine editor J. Kingston Pierce is astonished that “vigilance and increasing negative publicity seems not to have deterred publishers in the least from trying to save a few rubles by using stock images -- even when those photographs and illustrations have already appeared on the covers of other books.”

This time out, Pierce brings us surprising visual duplications on books by top selling, debut and international authors, while letting us know that, with help from his readers, “my mission continues.”

The most recent Copycat Covers expose on The Rap Sheet can be found here. Find all of them archived here.

Seeing Double

Over at The Rap Sheet, my colleague J. Kingston Pierce is now almost two years into his amazing project tracking down copycat covers. In fact, I’d venture that no one can put a candle to his collection. As Pierce said in his first copycat covers piece back in May 2006:

How many times have you spotted a novel or other book that duplicates the cover photo from a different work you have seen or read?

The causes of this trend seem pretty obvious. Corporate publishers, looking to enhance their bottom lines by producing more and more titles, and trying to capitalize on marketplace crazes … are prone these days to hasten the draft-to-finished-book process. As a consequence, they’re susceptible to using the same art as others. The fact that they can use identical artwork results from the creation and consolidation of stock photography companies, notably Corbis, Getty Images, and JupiterMedia, which make it easy and relatively cheap for publishers to find high-quality images that designers can use in putting together book covers. Also in the mix here, I suspect, is a calculation by publishers that their readers simply won’t notice that they’re employing the identical book jacket art (or even titles) that others have used before.

His latest two installments come less than a week apart and again present a surprising list of original cover art infractors. These two most recent copycat cover articles are here and here but, if you have the time, ride with Pierce through the whole catalog. It’s an eye-opening journey.

Split Decisions

I’ve commented infrequently in The Rap Sheet, January Magazine’s crime-fiction blog, on the habit of unknowing or cost-cutting book designers reusing the photographs employed previously on the covers of other volumes for their own new work. However, there seems to be an even more ubiquitous trend hitting publishing houses of late: what we might call “split covers.” These are book jackets that use not just one photograph, but two, often separated by titles and author names. Start paying attention, and see just how many of these split covers you spot while traipsing through bookstore aisles.

I can’t decide whether the proliferation of these divided fronts is due to the inability of their designers to choose between a couple of evocative shots, or because they’re simply trying too hard to attract every conceivable reader with their imagery. But in any case, there’s an abundance of these split covers decorating the mystery and crime-fiction shelves.





(And no, you’re not imagining that the jackets from Charlie Huston’s Already Dead and Derek Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open bear a remarkable similarity. This is indicative of designers resorting to the use of cheaper stock photos.)

The same design concept has been adopted by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, which is beginning to reissue Ross Macdonald’s 18 novels featuring Los Angeles private eye Lew Archer, beginning with The Way Some People Die (1951) and The Ivory Grin (1952):



A number of fiction works, both hardcover and paperback, have been dressed up with divided jackets:





However, this trend is by no means confined to the fiction racks. I’ve found even more examples of it elsewhere in bookstores:









What’s the likelihood that pointing out these duplicative designs is going to propel art directors and publishers to pursue any different creative direction than they’re already following? Not great; somebody, somewhere has undoubtedly determined that split covers sell, which is why we see so damn many of them. And isn’t imitation supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, anyway?

On the other hand, how many of these divided book covers can there be on shelves and end caps before buyers stop being able to tell them apart easily? Once marketing departments get wind of that trouble, you can bet we’ll be on to the next book cover design trend fast.