The Art of the Book Cover

This thread is for discussing memorable book covers, the good, the bad, the entertaining, the strange.

To start, Jim C. Hines tries to pose like the women on the covers of urban fantasy novels. He follows it up by posing like the men on romance covers. I love his recreation of these pictures. It really gets to the heart of what's wrong with them, while being very funny. And in the second set, we get to see his relationship with a teddy bear!

Also, the Chinese cover of George RR Martin's A Clash of Kings. That's a great cover. A Clash of Kings is a great book. However, cover and contents are entirely unrelated to each other.

The Jim Hines posts have made me laugh VERY hard.

All your book covers will belong to Keira Knightley.

big chicken that's a lot of covers for one person to be on. I wonder if nine is the record. How would I even go about finding that out?

And she's going to be on even more covers. Anna Karenina hasn't come out yet.

Ten covers. That has to be a record.

I saw this thing on Tumblr the other day about the Lolita book covers and how there was this project running for artists to recreate covers that are more true to the source material. It was really interesting.

ETA: Here's the link.

Oh God. How romantic.

That's hilarious.

Bwah! Too funny!

I had that original cover, and the window was a cut out, so there was a picture of the whole family behind the front cover.

I wonder who approved that cover. Do you think they know what the book is about?

That looks like Jaime and Cersei, but that isn't Casterly Rock in the background.

That cover has actually been around for a couple of years, I remember seeing it SF 3.0 and LOVING it. So hilariously perfect for FITA world, totally Aryan Incest Creepy to the max yo.

The Song of the Lioness series has had tons of book covers but my lord, what the what??

Is that supposed to be George and Jon? o.O

Alanna would never wear that much eyeliner.

She would also have arm muscles. Sigh.

Is the guy on the left* wearing a hoodie? It looks like a hoodie to me.

*I chose to believe they are just some rando dudes, not George or Jon.

Ten worst covers in the history of books. They're certainly bad, but the worst? I'm not convinced. I mean, Mind Pump is perfectly legit for the 80's. Is that Tom Selleck on the cover of Penetrator? Either way, it's a decent action cover for its day.

Okay, Classical Themes is bad, I'll admit that. Time Ninja is just confusing. What the hell is happening there? The one about being awesome is bad because none of those kids look anything like cool, let alone awesome. As as for Tarzan, that's pretty bad too.

For Best Dads, the problem is the actual title. Same with the colouring book, and Sister. There's nothing wrong with the one about ships, either.

So, I give it 4/10. Your scores?

I think the Tarzan cover is the most normal one. "The Best Dad is a Good Lover" and number 1 both made me laugh in shock. Time Ninja is a bit of a conceptual mess with the fire and the Olympic rings.

I give it 5/10 for WTF-ness.

I'm finding number 6 and sending it to someone...

It's a little known fact that after reading #8, Jerry Sandusky almost switched professions to become a classical pianist.

Jim C Hines is back, now with John Scalzi!

In possibly related news, I think I've gone blind. But if it's blindness vs the risk of seeing that Scalzi picture again, I think I'll cope.

The 50th Anniversary edition of The Bell Jar appears to tell the story about a woman and her love for unnaturally sized compacts.

Of course, this may seem mild in comparison to naughty farmgirl, Anne Shirley.

swsa wrote:
Of course, this may seem mild in comparison to naughty farmgirl, Anne Shirley.

Oh, that ain't right.

I seriously laughed out loud at one of the ONTD comments being "She looks like Ruby Gillis!"