Twin Piques

“When a book hits stores with a cover nearly identical to another’s, it’s the publishing equivalent of arriving at a party wearing the same dress as the hostess,” quipped Andrew Adam Newman in The New York Times three years ago. “But while book jacket look-alikes may chafe publishers, it happens more often than you might think.” Since embarking on my quest in 2006 to expose these multiplying cover clones, especially in the crime-fiction genre (where they seem particularly rife), I’ve certainly found that statement to be accurate. There are so many of these design infractions on modern bookshelves, that other bloggers have now started posting their own examples (see here, here, here, here, and here).

Yet, this 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. So, with the invaluable assistance of sharp-eyed Rap Sheet readers, my mission continues.

One of the latest and most egregious demonstrations of duplicated cover syndrome comes from Siren of the Waters, the debut novel by Michael Genelin, whose biographical brief describes him as “a graduate of UCLA and the UCLA Law School, [who] has served in the L.A. District Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Department of Justice in Central Europe ... [and] has written for film and has been an adviser to television series.” The book is being distributed in July by Soho Crime, a fine publisher that has nonetheless stumbled in bringing Genelin’s work to market. No graphic design expertise, not even so much as a magnifying loupe, is necessary to recognize that the gauzy shot of a woman fronting Siren of the Waters is the same one that already graced the 2005 Da Capo Press edition of John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions (1997), which Stephen Miller described in The Rap Sheet as “one of the great modern classics of crime fiction.” I would not be surprised to hear lawyer Genelin shout “Objection!” when he realizes that his brand-new baby looks suspiciously like the offspring of another man.

His disappointment might be mitigated, however, by knowing that he isn’t in this particular boat alone. Consider now the jacket from the pending American release of Irish author Declan Burke’s The Big O. Writing in January Magazine’s “Best Books of 2007” feature last December, I fairly gushed in my appreciation of the original Hag’s Head edition of The Big O, calling it “a big ol’ success, a tale fueled by the mischievous spirits of Donald E. Westlake, Elmore Leonard, and even Carl Hiaasen ...” Other critics were hardly less effusive, encouraging Burke to pursue a U.S. publishing contract for his work--which he was successful in doing. Imagine how frustrated he must have been, then, to discover that (as he explained in his blog) “his favourite of the five options the fiendishly clever cover-art boffins at Harcourt devised” was overly reminiscent of the 2005 Harper paperback release of Leonard’s 1989 novel, Killshot (the basis for a not yet released film starring Diane Lane and Mickey Rourke). While other authors have fumed over being embarrassed by their publishers’ unwillingness to commission one-of-a-kind artwork for their covers (click here and here), Burke has demonstrated a rather remarkable quiescence. “[T]hey do say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, do they not?” he wrote two months back in a post that feigned ignorance of Killshot’s author. “And, given that The Big O is a fourth-rate rip-off of Mr. Lennox/Leonard’s style, it makes perfect sense that the Harcourt designer boffins should produce a first-rate homage to one of Mr. Lennox/Leonard’s covers.”

In presenting this next case study, I need to credit Euro Crime’s Karen Meek, who happened upon these look-alike jackets first. I understand that novelist Gerri Brightwell was born in England, holds a doctorate in literature from the University of Minnesota, and is married to Canadian author-archaeologist Ian C. Esslemont. Her premiere Victorian mystery, The Dark Lantern, was released by Crown Publishing Group in March of this year and has enjoyed some critical praise. But more than a few observant folks have remarked on the fact that its front--showing what looks like a woman stopped along London’s Thames Embankment--bears a striking resemblance to the 2004 British hardcover edition of Jacqueline Winspear’s first novel, Maisie Dobbs, as well as that book’s 2005 paperback edition, shown here (both issued by publisher John Murray).

Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the double-trouble book covers I’ve cited in The Rap Sheet have been found only by happenstance, often as a result of my looking for something else entirely on the Web. That’s how I found this next pair. The first cover comes from a 944-page, 1986 Bantam paperback edition of The Complete Sherlock Holmes: All 4 Novels and 56 Short Stories, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The second is taken from the 2003 Random House Canada edition of The Fiend in Human, an “alternately dark and whimsical” historical mystery (as I wrote in January that year), by Canadian writer-composer John MacLachlan Gray. Of the several novels Gray has now penned (including last year’s Not Quite Dead), Fiend remains my favorite. But only lately did I realize that its blue-moody jacket wasn’t unique. The photo of a carriage and driver on a mud-covered city street is credited in Gray’s book as “Portland Place, London by Alvin Langdon Coburn, courtesy of the Royal Geographic Society, Bath.” The U.S. hardcover edition of Fiend used the identical photo, but with a different typographical arrangement.

Book designers are a clever lot, really. When compelled by today’s parsimonious publishers to rely on stock photography, instead of commissioning fresh art, they often seek novelty by combining images. Instances of that are found in our next two covers. The first comes from the 2004 W.W. Norton trade paperback edition of The Meaning of Night, by Michael Cox, a beguiling Victorian yarn about an ambitious “booklover, scholar, and murderer” named Edward Glyver. Its companion jacket here is from a British historical thriller-- due for release in August--called The Minutes of the Lazarus Club (Michael Joseph), by archaeologist and first-time novelist Tony Pollard. While I have yet to receive a copy of Pollard’s work, and therefore haven’t had a chance to double-check the credits, I’m willing to wager that the photograph of a man in a top hat (acknowledged in The Meaning of Night as having been taken by onetime Time/Life shutterbug Donald Uhrbrock and available through Getty Images) is the very same one--though reversed, of course--used on Cox’s novel. The backgrounds are dissimilar, though, with the one used on The Meaning of Night apparently coming from the Mary Evans Picture Gallery.

What I’ve learned from researching the phenomenon of copycat covers is that this practice is far from new. According to a terrific site called Bookscans, the mission of which is to graphically illustrate “the evolution of Vintage American Paperbacks--1939 through 1959 (and beyond),” low-budget American publishers were known during the last century to casually “recycle” cover art from one book to another, and even between books and pulp magazines. A gallery of such “twins” can be viewed here. The illustration referenced below, of a revolver and an evidently terrified face reflected in a coffee table (click on the images to enlarge them), was employed not just these two times--on the jackets of On Ice, by Robert George Dean, and The Informer, by Liam O’Flaherty--but at least twice more on other novels.

What’s worth remembering about today’s copycat covers, however, is that they’re coming from large publishing concerns with deep pockets, not their smaller, independent competitors. They are another result of corporations doing things on the cheap. Readers willing to plunk down their hard-earned cash (even during the present, onerous Bush recession) deserve better.

A final note: I’m always looking for more examples of this trend. If you run across more copycat covers, especially those decorating crime novels, don’t hesitate to e-mail me. I shall post more examples as they become available.

POSTSCRIPT: Not long after this post went up, reviewer and former bookseller Becky LeJeune dropped me an e-note to say that she recently blogged about another unfortunate incident of “carbon copy covers,” involving S.J. Bolton’s new debut novel, Sacrifice, and the 2006 U.S. paperback edition of Jean-Christophe Grange’s The Empire of the Wolves. Read more about their similarities here.

READ MORE: “Book Covers and Marketing,” by Rick Blechta
(Type M for Murder).