11 June 2013

Are Those Gargoyles? Is That a Mangaboo Sun?

From Flavorwire’s roundup of “Twenty Embarrassingly Bad Book Covers for Classic Novels”:

Some of the other covers on this list are simply out of fashion, or designed for other cultures. But a lot reflect the underside of digital publishing: outfits slapping any old art onto a public-domain text in order to squeeze a few dollars out of some bargain-hunting reader.

(Hat tip to Gili Bar-Hillel, whose Hebrew translation of The Marvelous Land of Oz will have a much more traditional John R. Neill image on the cover.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bargain hunting? Those POD text "editions" are often more expensive than the decent looking illustrated "regular" ones.

J. L. Bell said...

I can't find this edition specifically, so I don't know its format or the source of the text. If it's indeed a POD edition facing cheaper competition from Dover and other reprinters, then this edition may never have existed in the real world, only as a digital possibility.