Cover art redux

[sartorias]

Harry Connolly is interesting about cover art, sub-genres, and pinning down what is "real" literature.

He posts three covers, one of which is to The Postman Always Rings Twice, which sits on literature lists, as the other two examples very plainly aren't. I've always thought of that novel as unexamined male gaze trash, tightly written trash, but

Comments

[martianmooncrab]

I thought it was a play first..

[serialbabbler]

It seems to have been a book, two movies, and an opera.

[serialbabbler]

I was recently making fun of the cover art on Steven Piziks' Corporate Mentality because it looks like it should be a book about intergalactic sex slaves leading Chip and Dale dancers in a bid to take over the galaxy. (The first half is actually a fairly interesting take on gender identity, twins, and identity in general. The second half kind of falls apart and turns into typical genre fare, but so it goes. I guess the illustration was supposed to be of the second half. Heh.)

I think the difference between most of the "literature" covers and most genre covers is that they don't seem to say anything about the stories themselves. They seem more designed to tell you about the people reading the stories. (That is, the genre covers are meant to tell you what the story is about in some sense, however badly, where the literature covers are meant to tell other people that you are the sort of person who reads literature. Of course, I could be wrong about that.)

[sartorias]

Or maybe they (lit covers) are to create a reserved intellectual mood?

[serialbabbler]

That's possible although "reserved and intellectual" usually makes me think of these sorts of covers:

http://bookworship.com/

Rather than these sorts:

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-Literary-Fiction/zgbs/digital-text/157053011

My intellect is clearly dated. *grin*

[sartorias]

Those top ones look dated to me--but yeah. Symbolism as opposed to representation.

[asakiyume]

There are *so many* factors at play here. There's the intersection of genre and literary fiction, which is always changing; there are the developments and fashions and issues and so on that arise in both genre and lit fic--and then there's fashion in cover art, both for lit fic and genre, and overall. Justin Howe sometimes will do entries at his blog called "One book, four covers" (e.g., this post), which show just how differently cover art can skew a story.

[sartorias]

Underscoring again the power of image--and how the effect cannot be completely predicted or controlled.

[anonymous]

Now I actually like the lurid pulp style covers of the 1930s to early 1960s (and sometimes beyond e.g. with gothic novels). I'm not sure why those covers appeal to me, since I'm too young to have read books with such covers back in the day. But they do. I have tried to evoke those old lurid pulp covers with the covers for my Silencer series, which is surprisingly difficult to do, unless you can afford to commission an illustrator

[sartorias]

That's interesting about covers for similar genres looking completely different. I wonder how the various elements signal differently--cultural differences?

[anonymous]

Sometimes it's just that one book with a particular type of cover catches on and soon you find similar covers all over the genre. For example, one publisher put a detail of a historical painting on a plain black background on the cover for a Henning Mankell crime novel that became a bestseller in Germany, so soon you saw details of historical paintings on all sorts of crime novels and thrillers. It was a really lovely look, too, but Americans and Brits wouldn't even recognize those books as crime fiction or thrillers

[sartorias]

I know a lot of Americans who also prefer British covers!