Take a Gander

Three years into editor J. Kingston Pierce’s delicious rampage against the design powers that would have us reading books with unoriginal covers, you’d think things would be getting better. Both January Magazine and The Rap Sheet boast large readerships and, thus, Pierce’s voice is fairly influential in the book biz. When he says stuff, people tend to pay attention. And were we starting to see more original cover art? Maybe. More frequent commissions of original illustrations? More daring typography? I thought so. At least, I believed that things were getting better.

But then, within just a few weeks of each other, new books by Jeff Abbott and Peter Leonard (you know, Elmore’s son) crossed my desk. That’s when I knew that things weren’t getting better. At all. Or maybe--just maybe, understand--the covers of these books (both published during the first half of 2009) offer a strong case for the collective unconscious. What else could explain the almost eerie similarities between just about every single element of their respective dust jackets? And their titles? They’re the same!

Abbott’s Trust Me is from Dutton, while Leonard’s novel is published by Minotaur Books. Both feature the words--Trust Me--in prominent sans serif type, all uppercase, on the top halves of their covers. In both cases, the words have been filled with an image. (Money for Leonard’s book; something wood- or skin-like for Abbott’s.) Then we come to the disembodied eyes--different eyes, sure, but both sets probably female--looking directly into the camera ... and following us from the page. Then there are the authors’ names: both positioned on the lower half of these covers. Both, again, in uppercase sans serif. And all of these components--the eyes without faces, the bold type, filled and unfilled--float against dark backgrounds on the two jackets.

Design is a subjective art. And the success of any single design? Well, that’s subjective, too. But neither of these book covers works particularly well for me. I can’t imagine either of them leaping off the shelf. Especially since, in a lot of bookstores, these two would be shelved fairly closely together. I can visualize a potential buyer’s head swiveling, from one to the other, then walking a bit further up the aisle and putting his or her hands instead on a copy of Paul Tremblay’s The Little Sleep (Holt), which is arguably one of the strongest crime-fiction covers to wrap a book this year--and, coincidentally, also features a disembodied eye.

Upshot: the two versions of Trust Me were produced so closely together, timewise, that I want to be sure you don’t think I’m implying a deliberate copycat element. It doesn’t seem possible, or even very likely. Although one could certainly argue that a bit more research by one publishing house or the other might have been beneficial, these things happen under deadline. Trust me. It’s unavoidable.