Identical Cousins All the Way

Speaking of book covers, Declan Burke of Crime Always Pays has a rather egregious example of duplication on offer. It seems that the same Irish publisher, Maverick House, has now put out two completely different volumes--Alan Sherry’s The A-Z of Irish Crime (2007) and The A-Z of Irish Crime: A Guide to Criminal Slang in Ireland (2008), by John Mooney and Jean Harrington--bearing almost exactly the same jacket artwork.

Usually these sorts of copycat covers at least come from different publishing houses (though there have been exceptions). I haven’t previously seen a pair of repeat offenders so closely matched in design coming from the same book company.

Let’s hope this case doesn’t incite a mini-trend of its own.

UPDATE: Declan Burke dropped me a follow-up e-mail note, saying me that he’d been contacted by Jean Harrington, co-publisher at Maverick, who wanted to explain this confusion of covers. “Apparently they yanked the first A-Z at the very last minute last year,” he wrote, “and decided to use the cover for another project ... although the appearance of the second book was the first mention I’d heard that the initial project had been pulled.” So should we interpret this as laziness in the Maverick art department, or just inadequate PR? You decide.