Good books, bad covers
I subscribe to a number of e-zines, and this article particularly caught my eye recently.
Bad covers slapped on on classic books.
https://lithub.com/50-very-bad-book-covers-for-literary-classics/
At first I was incredulous — some of these are so very bad and so incredibly far off the mark that it was obvious that the cover designers hadn’t read the books.
But then I started to get suspicious. Some of these classics were so well known that I couldn’t imagine how anyone could get the covers so badly wrong.
I mean, look at this one on the left.
Little Women in Maoist China? Really?
They’re soooo over-the-top bad and inappropriate that I suspect it’s deliberate.
Sheba Blake is printed on a lot of the covers, and I looked the name up and it’s a “publisher”. The thing is, once a book is out of copyright, anyone can do anything with them — it’s the reason people were able to write and publish mash-ups of classics, like “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and others of that ilk.
My guess is that they made the most outrageously silly covers — and their name on them — to give them some publicity.
It obviously worked.
And maybe “any publicity is good publicity” — I don’t know.
Or maybe the idea is to sell these editions as a joke. I can imagine some people would love to get classic books with outrageously silly covers.
What do you think?
