such copycat covers, and these--as well as a couple of others--deserve to be added to that growing catalogue.One needn’t be a Mensa member to spot that the same lovely curvature of spine and swell of female derrière that draws one’s eye to the front of Mosley’s Killing Johnny Fry (2007), “a sexistential novel,” also features (if slightly more light-filled) on the jacket of Jennifer Ackerman’s Sex, Sleep, Eat, Drink, Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body (2007), a pretty fascinating look at the human body’s rhythms and mysteries. The Bloomsbury USA paperback edition of Mosley’s novel, released in December, carries that identical image. Let’s hope that somebody at Houghton Mifflin, Ackerman’s publisher, notices this unintentional duplication, and picks a different shot for the cover of Sex, Sleep’s trade paper release.
At least our next two exhibits were originally published on opposite sides of the Atlantic, so the comparison wasn’t so easily made. The cover on the left comes from Mark Timlin’s 2000 Nick Sharman private
eye novel, All the Wrong Places, brought to the reading public by No Exit Press. Meanwhile, its companion on the right is MacAdam/Cage Publishing’s 2005 paperback edition of Bad Debts, Peter Temple’s 1996 novel featuring cabinet-maker and finder of lost people Jack Irish. Nobody might have noticed the reused cover images, had No Exit Press not released a 2005 softcover edition of Timlin’s book in the United States, carrying the same stock photo. Oops!The link between this particular pair of book jackets took me a while to make. No long ago, prolific Rap Sheet contributor Ali Karim had the opportunity to interview British littérateur Roger Jon Ellory, whose latest novel--a Richard & Judy book club pick--is A Quiet Belief in Angels (2007). While editing that interview, and installing links to
various books, I found myself staring at the cover from Ellory’s 2004 book, Ghostheart. I was sure I’d seen that same photograph someplace else before. It just took some time to figure out where. Then one day, I was cruising through my local bookshop, and there it was: on the cover of the 2005 Harvest Books paperback edition of Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, a novel about robbery and romance that I read a number of years ago, after first interviewing Helprin for People magazine. Admittedly, this stock shot of New York’s Grand Central Station is terrific. But did it really need to be used on more than one book? The designer of Ghostheart attempted to disguise this duplication by reversing the original image and then overlaying it a silhouette shot of a man and young girl, but the reuse still remains obvious.Finally, I want to mention some good news: that we just barely dodged a bullet on a truly awful example of book cover copycat-ism. Last summer, I brought attention to the proliferation of a stock photograph (available through Seattle-based Getty Images) showing a youthful brunette woman, dressed in a full-length skirt. (The original post is here.) That same miss appeared with different backgrounds on the 2006 paperback
edition of John Crowley’s Little, Big, the 2007 Bloomsbury Publishing reissue of Ann Harries’ No Place for a Lady, and the hardback releases of Pearl Luke’s Madame Zee (2006) and Joel Rose’s The Blackest Bird (2007). Earlier this week, I received an advance reading copy of Bantam Dell’s forthcoming (in May) paperback edition of Robert Goddard’s 1986 novel, Past Caring--and there she was again, like a bad penny! The same woman! A scan of that ARC cover can be seen on the left here. Fortunately, this Getty stock image does not appear on the finished copy of Bantam’s Past Caring. Did somebody at the publisher actually notice this felony of duplication in the making, or is it mere coincidence that the inset shot was replaced at the last minute with one of a woman reading a note, as seen on the right? Either way, I’m just glad to see our beskirted friend gone from Past Caring. It would be too much, though, to expect that her tenure as a cover model is over; she just seems to be too popular with book designers.If you happen across any more examples of copycat covers, especially those on crime novels, don’t hesitate to e-mail me. I’ll post more examples as they become available.
1 comment:
Some examples of covers wherein publishers should just have bought the stock art outright so no one else could use it, or should have thought twice about releasing books with virtually the same covers only months apart.
From the Smart Bitches
From the Women of Mystery
From the NY Times
And just imagine if Borders goes ahead with their plan to face a much larger percentage of their books out...the problem will become much more obvious.
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