Judging A Book By Its Cover

It never fails: I no sooner actually write a post about how I have nothing to post about than I think of fifteen different possibilities for entries.

In this case, though, I was sitting this afternoon desultorily flipping through the rats’ packs in Packrat—hoping a raincloud would pop up for me, but it never did—when I kept focusing on Judging A Book By Its Cover, a collection of essays edited by Nicole Matthews and Nickianne Moody that I recently reviewed for M/C Reviews.

I’m fascinated by reader-response work—though frequently horribly frustrated by it, as well—and it formed a key element of my thesis.

I’m also fascinated by the marketing of fiction, though not quite in the same way as the essays covered in Judging A Book By Its Cover, which focuses largely on twentieth-century publications: my nineteenth-century interests have more to do with advertising and networks of authorship than with graphic design.

But the book did make me realise that I have some books with truly hideous covers on my shelves.

(Of course, I also have a wide number of books with gorgeous covers; I may do a companion post once I’ve finished this one.)

These aren’t the worst, but they’re all fairly awful.

Of course, picking a 1970s reprint of an Agatha Christie novel is rather like shooting fish in a barrel; they’re all dreadful, really.

But this is one of the worst:

That poor owl.

I haven’t actually read this novel, I’m ashamed to admit (I only picked it up in May this year, judging by my inscription) so I have no idea whether a brutally murdered owl is central to the plot, but it’s certainly not something you want to look at on your bedside table as you’re dropping off to sleep.

Of course, I picked Endless Night over two others, which I think have much more revolting covers: Lord Edgeware Dies shows the back of a man’s head with a knife sticking out of the nape of his neck, while By The Pricking Of My Thumbs gives prime position to the broken, dirty head of a porcelain doll.

(That latter instance may not freak out other people as it does me, but creepy dolls are right up there with clowns in the terror factor, as far as I’m concerned.)

Either way, neither of them were images that I wanted on the blog.

If 1970s’ Agatha Christies are too easy a target, so are 1980s’ Rex Stouts. At least Endless Night probably never stood a chance. The image above is from a 1971 reprint, but the novel itself was published in 1967, and would almost certainly have always had a hideous cover.

But this cover of Some Buried Caesar is a 1982 reprint of one of the earliest Nero Wolfe mysteries, from 1938:

By all rights, this should have some lovely, elegant typography and minimalist artwork. Instead, we have a grimacing man about to be speared by a pitchfork (if it helps, he’s already dead. Spoiler!) and a fairly ugly font.

It doesn’t really seem fair, for one of the funniest and cleverest of the Wolfe mysteries.

But then, I revere Stout, so perhaps I’m taking up the cudgels on his behalf a little too readily.

But then, I also revere Sayers, and I’ve included this in the list:

This, like Stout, is a 1980s’ reprint of a 1930s’ novel: in this case, the 1988 edition of 1937’s Busman’s Honeymoon. They’re dreadful editions—the type of paperbacks where the glue shatters after a decade, so every time you read it subsequently there’s a constant gentle rain of yellowish fragments into your lap.

Really, it doesn’t look as bad as the preceding examples. The font is rather pretty and period appropriate, and I rather like the portrait of Wimsey, although I suspect it flatters him.

But it gives away vital information.

Sayers’s (or rather, Wimsey’s) technique comes down to this: when you know how, you know who. This cover, then, gives away the murderer, if you read it the right way. And that always irritates me. (My copy of Ngaio Marsh’s Grave Mistake does the same: it’s as though they were designed by people who went on to write programme promos for Channel 7. But then Marsh’s title is a dead giveaway, as well.)

Still on the crime theme, how about a late edition Trixie Belden? This one’s from 1984: there’s no evidence that it’s a reprint and it’s a late title in the series, so it looks as though someone deliberately marketed a new title with this cover.

I mentioned in my second post on Tunnels the widely popular belief that boys won’t read books with girl protagonists—I wonder if that’s behind the androgynous image of Trixie in the middle of the cover.

I mean, I know she’s a tomboy, but honestly. She looks like Jimmy Olsen.

She’s more feminine in the bottom picture, assuming that’s her in the bottom-left corner next to Honey Wheeler.

Still, I’ve saved the best for last. This, I suspect, is the worst cover on my entire bookshelf:

This is a reprint—undated, alas—in the Abbey Rewards series, a series of reprinted novels sharply divided on gender lines: the list of “Girls’ Fiction” on the back includes Rosamund Takes The Lead, Sidney Seeks Her Fortune, and Polly of Primrose Hill, while “Boys’ Fiction” encourages them to read Adrift in the Stratosphere, Wreckers’ Bay, and Berenger’s Toughest Case.

The book itself is an inoffensive if unoriginal school story, but the cover is nightmarish.

No—I’ve unwittingly told a lie.

What Katy Did Next (1886) is the third of Susan Coolidge’s five novels about the Carr children and their lives in New England in the 1860s.

What Katy Did Next, actually, shows Katy travelling to Europe and meeting a handsome naval lieutenant with whom she could live happily ever after.

Some time in the distant past, I bought a copy of What Katy Did Next from this Abbey Rewards series.

If I hadn’t subsequently removed it from the house on the grounds that the enormous eyes and hideously disproportionate heads scared me witless, that would certainly have been the gem of this list.