Saturday, December 27, 2008

Never Judge a Book by Its Cover

I was just thinking about how people say "Never judge a book by its cover." While I wish this wasn't true, I know that at least I do. I like realistic fiction so I tend to go for new looking books with a person on the cover. My sister likes fantasy, and the books she looks for tend to be hard covers with some sort of drawing or design on the cover. 

            
 Many popular books have different covers. Look at the Harry Potter
 books. 
Depending on which country your in you will get a completely different cover. Why? Is it to give us something to spend money collecting? Or maybe it's just to appeal to different audiences? Prevent one artist from getting to rich? Or maybe it's just to confuse people like me who think it's a completely different book.



 Harry Potter even has different covers in the US of A for kids versus for adults. 
I won't post them here but while I was looking for the image above I found a bunch of book covers for manly men that didn't want to be caught reading Harry Potter. The covers are..
... I'm not quite sure how to describe them. If you want to know more go search them yourself. 

Even for books that only have one cover, a lot of time and thought goes into them. There are 
contests offering thousands of dollars for someone who comes up with a cover. Multiple tries are made before deciding on a final one. To the left are attempts at creating the cover for Scott Westerfeld's book Uglies. The one on the left is the first try and the one on the right is basically what the cover turned out being. (The one on the left ended up being the cover to his book about his books called Bogus to Bubbly)


So now that I've given you lots of my random thoughts on book covers, I want to know yours. Comment and let me know which of these different covers are your favorite? 
Most sincerely, dearly, and happy holidays, Emma

Ps. Did anyone realize that on the book cover for Uglies, not only does it misspell the title (it says The Uglies), it also misspelled the authors name (Scott Westerfield vs. Scott Westerfeld). Luckily these thing where caught in editing and fixed!

2 comments:

Emma said...

Wow guys make me feel great. No ones even going to respond to my post? Thanks :) it's ok though!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Simon Brooks said...

Hi Emma,

I just got your post today and I love it. In regard to Hary Potter number one, I bought a copy in the UK of number one - it was an adult cover which was a black and white photo of a train, similar to the one in the artists/kids version. I have since heard that being a first edition paperback for that book, it is worth about $200! I should have got a copy for me too!

I also have to be captured by the cover, but I also look between the pages (usually) before I hand money over. Usually my judgement is pretty good, although when I do not check, I get caught out!

Happy New Year to you too!