1.
We met at a writer’s conference at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. At sixty-six, Patrick O’Connor had a roving eye and a drinking problem. A self-professed Trotskyite and anti-Stalinist from the old radical ‘30s left wing of the Democrat party, he was Ayn Rand’s editor at New American Library in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
We quickly discovered we had something in common: our aversion to Ayn Rand’s philosophy.
I was an insecure young professor of philosophy at a conservative evangelical college, with a troubled marriage and two kids. Cedarville College was four miles from Antioch, but so distant ideologically from the famously radical Antioch that it might as well have been four light years.
I was prepared to dislike Patrick O’Connor intensely, based upon his association with a writer I considered odious. But he knocked me off balance with his first words. I later learned he was quite practiced at this.
We met in the quad during a cigarette break. Patrick O’Connor nursed a black coffee in a white ceramic mug he’d walked off with from the college cafeteria. I had a deep tan from mowing five acres of grass every week that summer, and lazing with my kids at the pool. A small man with a round face, he had a sly smile and a direct manner. We regarded each other from opposite ends of a picnic table.
Hey kid, have your good looks gotten in the way of you being taken seriously as a writer?
I deflected his question. Feeling misplaced in both a marriage and a job led to fantasies about women, art, and salvation that would later land me in world of trouble; I had already taken one of the women writers at the conference for a late night spin in my convertible, and had plans to see her that night. Somehow I had arrived at two non-original ideas: that I needed to write fiction, not philosophy, and that my personal aesthetic should be, “I write to get the girl.” I was a hollowed out writing conference cliché, and I was sure Patrick O’Connor saw right through me.
Was I a frivolous person, impersonating a serious one? Talking to her favorite editor, I was certain that Ayn Rand did not see herself this way.
2.
On April 15, 2011, almost twenty years after my encounter with Patrick O’Connor, and almost 30 years after Ayn Rand’s death in 1982, Atlas Shrugged opened in theaters around the country. The movie is based on Rand’s bestselling dystopian novel of the same name, a literary vehicle expressing her trademark worldview: the morality of rational self-interest, or, Objectivism. The film was financed by a wealthy devotee of Ayn Rand’s work, and marketed aggressively to the Tea Party demographic by FreedomWorks, one of the prime movers in the Tea Party movement, which engaged in a massive campaign to encourage audience attendance, and to push the film into as many theaters as possible. The opening line of Atlas Shrugged — “Who is John Galt?” — has appeared on signs at Tea Party protests across America. Glenn Beck praises Atlas Shrugged regularly, and hosted a panel discussion dedicated to asking if Rand’s fiction is finally becoming reality. Once a shadowy cult presence in the margins of American life, Ayn Rand is now one of the central intellectual and cultural inspirations for the base of the Republican Party.
3.
A few days ago on Twitter someone tweeted, “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in philosophy: the search for a moral justification for selfishness.”
Ayn Rand’s books provided that moral justification for my evangelical Christian students. Atlas Shrugged, in particular. They were drawn to the fierce youthful idealism of The Fountainhead, which they found, quote, empowering. I found both novels to be insufferable. Rand was a third rate novelist of turgid prose who saw no reason to pen a sentence without making a speech.
Here is a sample sentence from Atlas Shrugged:
That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call “free will” is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.
As a stylist, she could be dreadful, her prose in service to her philosophy:
It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness — and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question.
A drop of rain pain in the shape of a question: “Who is John Galt.” That’s some raindrop.
4.
I don’t remember what I said to deflect Patrick O’Connor’s question — something short and inane. I was already deeply conflicted about my appearance, and felt frequently that my life was a fraud, a series of performances at home and at work. Teaching was a kind of performance art. Although I had chosen a substantive discipline, social and political philosophy, I often wondered whether this was to mask my insecurities. I felt myself to be frivolous and vain. Writing a book on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida had done nothing to dissuade me from this view, as Derrida himself was regarded as a lightweight, a “deconstructionist” more in vogue with language and literature departments than with “serious” philosophy departments in academe.
I steered the conversation to safer topics: Antioch, and Ayn Rand’s books. Antioch was a hotbed of student radicalism and curricular innovation. Two years later, four miles southeast, my “Christian” college would try to fire me for publishing a book on feminism, yet here I was in conversation with the editor of an indomitable woman from Russia, herself among the first women to be admitted to university after the Russian Revolution — an atheist and fierce critic of religion — who was nevertheless the guiding light of some of my evangelical Christian students.
The performative contradictions in that last sentence continue to astonish me.
5.
By the time I met Patrick O’Connor, I was itching for a fight about Ayn Rand. Two students were making my life hellish in class. Both were Econ students, promoting Rand as an apostle of free market capitalism and suspicious of my muddle-headed liberalism which harped about the growing chasm in Reagan’s America between the rich and the poor and the need for distributive justice. John Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness? Forget it, Rawls was a wuss. Additionally, they were having difficulty with the concept of Jesus of Nazareth having compassion for the poor, like, say, Mother Teresa. Never mind that Jesus was a Jewish Mediterranean peasant, probably illiterate, with a biting critique of the rich and possessed of peasant humor — “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven” — my students weren’t buying it. It was not “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do) for these students, it was more like, “What would John Galt think.” I didn’t give a tinker’s damn about what John Galt thought. Holly and Mark were becoming royal pains and I wanted to kick Patrick O’Connor in the ass.
So when he told me that he was a Trotskyite, a Communist, and from the democratic wing of the Democratic party, I knew he was as misplaced with Rand as I was at my college.
I asked him directly: What was she like to work with? How had he managed to be that woman’s editor all those years?
Do you want to know why Ayn Rand’s books sell so well? he countered.
Well, yes.
Because she writes the best children’s literature in America, O’Connor said. The Fountainhead is practically a rite of passage for alienated youth. She writes these epic, Wagnerian things. Where the sex takes place on the very highest plane and it speaks to the kids’ highest aspirations, their youthful idealism. It’s all YA stuff.
In that case, I argued, people should grow out of her, like a phase, they should get over her ideas when they become adults.
This is America, he said. There aren’t many ideas. Ayn Rand had a few simple ones which she believed in fiercely and promoted relentlessly.
But surely you don’t agree with her philosophy? The whole Objectivism thing from Atlas Shrugged?
Of course not! But we never talked politics. I knew better.
I wanted to know just how well Ayn Rand sold, really.
She paid the bills. The lights, the gas, the heating bills, the Christmas bonuses. Here’s the thing you gotta know about publishing, kid. The publishing industry itself is basically left, but true publishers publish what they think will sell. There is very little publishing “from belief” and that’s the way it has always been. We’ll publish anything that we know will sell, and everyone — no matter what they may think of her personally — everyone, every one, admires her sales.
I asked about the “didactic nature” of her prose and he laughed.
Didactic, hell, it’s worse than that. She writes to convert!
I thought of my evangelical Christian students. They liked the idea of conversion. They’d like to convert all of godless Russia to Christianity. China, too. And of course, they wanted to “win America for Christ.” The irony of this: these good Christian kids admired an evangelical atheist who believed in conversion. My head swam.
What about Rand’s reputation for being “difficult?”
I did everything she said.
What’s everything? (I had three books in the pipeline. Naively, and un-Rand-like, I said yes to everything Macmillan and Prentice Hall told me.)
Ayn Rand wanted approval of copy, advertising, art, you name it, O’Connor said. Publishers almost never give in to these kinds of demands, but we did. Because of her sales. I told the bosses, look, it’s her bat and ball.
6.
You can get schooled at Twitter if you have the right friends. The other day someone tweeted that Facebook is the people you went to school with, and Twitter the people you wish you went to school with.
So. the other day, Maud Newton tweeted: “Irony of Atlas Shrugged, movie about great people laid low by mediocre jealous people, is that it is wholly mediocre.”
It’s been years since I spoke with Patrick O’Connor. And I’ve had time to think about Rand, about her legacy, about the way she never really went out of fashion among what John Scalzi calls the “nerd revenge porn” crowd. And I agree with O’Connor that Rand wrote children’s literature. The problem is that a lot of these people have grown up, put on colorful colonial uniforms, and are trying to shrink the nation’s budget to the size where it can be dragged into the bathroom and drowned in the bathtub. A libertarian whose ideas are as wacky as Rand’s (who in fact is named Rand) is now a United States senator in Kentucky. Former Fed Chairman and economist Alan Greenspan is a devotee of Ayn Rand. And a guy whom no one had heard of until recently, congressman Paul Ryan, (R-WI) Chairman of the House Budget Committee, has been making the GOP case for massive budget cuts that will hurt the poorest and most vulnerable among us, using principles derived from Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” of Objectivism, and requiring his staff to read her work.
Paul Ryan proposes a budget plan would cap non-security discretionary spending at $360 billion for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 and freezing it for five years. That’s equal to 2006 spending levels. Over the next decade that means cuts to education, job training, and social services of 25 percent below levels needed to maintain current services. These reductions come on top of the $38.5 billion already cut from this year’s budget.
Two-thirds of the long term budget cuts that Ryan proposes are directed at middle class and low-income people, as well as the poorest of the poor at home and abroad. At the same time, he proposes tax cuts up to 30 percent for the nation’s wealthiest corporations.
Paul Ryan and his followers have solidified the connection between Ayn Rand, the Tea Party, and the Grand Old Party, with nary an outcry from the “religious right,” Karl Rove’s “base” that put George W. Bush in power. No one that I am aware of in the religious right has called attention to the words of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah in the Bible:
Doom to you who legislate evil, who make laws that make victims — laws that make misery for the poor, that rob my destitute people of dignity, exploiting defenseless widows, taking advantage of homeless children. What will you have to say on Judgment Day, when Doomsday arrives out of the blue? Who will you get to help you? What good will your money do you?
Isaiah 10:1-3, The Message translation
In lecture tours around America, Ayn Rand defended “the virtue of selfishness.” She had a long term love affair with Nathaniel Brandon, a young psychologist, who later established the Nathaniel Brandon Institute to promote Rand’s philosophy. Though it was reported that she did so with her husband’s full knowledge, it is generally acknowledged that Frank O’Connor (no relation to Patrick) found the experience to be “difficult.”
I don’t know if Patrick O’Connor got himself laid in Yellow Springs, Ohio. But the affair with the writer I met at that Antioch conference created deep pain in my family, and in hers, and led to the breakup of both marriages. In time, I came to understand the wisdom of that saying, “All love affairs are special cases, and yet at the same time each is the same case” — but in my case, it was too late.
I understand the selfishness part of Objectivism. It’s the virtue part that causes me difficulty.
7.
On the day that Atlas Shrugged opened in theatres, someone tweeted, “Republicanism is crumbling of its own avarice, lust for power, excesses, and hypocrisy. It could not be otherwise when their entire “philosophy” is based upon the works of a sociopath.”
Patrick O’Connor did not think that Ayn Rand was a sociopath—to him she was just a loveable little old Jewish lady from Leningrad– although apparently his bosses at New American Library thought otherwise.
“She can’t be Jewish, she’s a fascist!” he reported them saying.
O’Connor challenged their hypocrisy: You’ve been living off this woman for years. She’s been paying all your bills.
The philosopher Jurgen Habermas spoke often of the “legitimation crisis” that plagues late capitalism, as core communication functions in society become disabled or “colonized” by money and power. I’ve often wondered whether Patrick O’Connor believed that publishers decrying Ayn Rand as a fascist while enjoying the benefits of her labor should undergo a legitimation crisis or shut up.
Here are Ayn Rand’s own words, in Atlas Shrugged.
Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become tools of other men. Blood, whips, guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other.
8.
My encounter with Patrick O’Connor went to the heart of my struggles in those days: Was I a serious person? Was I really a pretty boy, flighty, without substance? Or someone serious enough to write, to take myself seriously as a writer? Ayn Rand took herself seriously and produced dreck—really dangerous stuff. She was a true believer. I no longer knew what I believed. I was carried away by the next breeze, toward the next woman, self absorbed and a wisp of the wind—but she stood as firmly planted as an oak. Rand was like Reagan: wrong but strong. She has endured, despite turgid prose and half baked ideas that were laughed out of the academy by people like me.
The year before I met Patrick O’Connor, Mary Gaitskill published a novel called Two Girls, Fat and Thin, which featured a thinly disguised Rand character, Anna Granite, and her philosophy of “Definitism.” Like the character Justine in her novel, Gaitskill had actually interviewed followers of Ayn Rand. I asked Mary Gaitskill: what is it about Ayn Rand, and why is she still here? What inspired her to write about Ayn Rand? Gaitskill wrote back:
I was inspired in part by realizing how important Ayn Rand’s ideas still were, and how deep they got into the American psyche. I thought then (and I’ve been proved right) that she was much more influential than she was given credit for. I didn’t have to be that smart to conclude this, I knew that Alan Greenspan had been an early devotee, and that William Buckley had taken her very seriously and that Atlas Shrugged was (according to one poll) one of the five top best-sellers in the history of the world, up there with the Bible. I found this astonishing. Still do.
Gaitskill went on to say:
Rand appears to be so crazy, and yet she really does speak for an aspect of America, really for an aspect of human experience. She treats big ideas in a way the common person can understand them; that is one legitimate reason for her popularity. Something I noticed about the followers, the “cultists” that I met–they tended to be nice people yearning for bigger meaning in their lives. Most of them were not especially selfish. It’s worth noting that most of them were also NOT people who knew Rand or were part of the early group. Those people, the few I met, struck me as both crazy and unpleasant. But the lower-level followers, no. They were in their own way idealists.
9.
Patrick O’Connor believed that Ayn Rand sold because she knew who she was, she knew what she wanted, and because she spoke to people’s common dreams– the dreams of well meaning, idealistic people who want something more. I wasn’t dreaming of anything that day at Antioch, except maybe Rilke’s earnest childlike plea: Change your life. I knew that I needed to change my life, but didn’t know how. I couldn’t guide anyone reliably, anywhere, except in circles.
Saul Alinsky used to say, when you don’t know where you are going, any road will do.
Meanwhile, The Economist has reported several sharp spikes in sales of Atlas Shrugged since 2007. According to the Ayn Rand Institute, sales of the novel hit an all-time annual record that year, then reached a new record in 2008. USA Today reports that Atlas Shrugged made its debut on the USA Today Best Selling Books List on January 22, 2009, two days after President Obama’s inauguration. On April 20, Atlas Shrugged, first published in 1957, hit number 65 on the list, propelled by the new movie. Released in 299 theatres, the movie made $1.7 million in its first week.
As Patrick O’Connor insisted to me in 1992, she sells.
Do you remember this joke that was circulating in the 1980s: While deconstructionists were taking over English departments, Republicans were taking over the country.
I never found that joke to be funny.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
It would be interesting to know the exact reasons of the publishing companies choices. Why a different cover on the other side of the Atlantic? The cover does make a difference for the reader, for example,I wanted to read ‘The Paris Wife’ by Paula Mc Lain but I waited until I could get the American edition which showed a woman in a blue suit obviously sitting at a Paris Café, it exactly reflected my fantasies before reading the novel whereas the Art Deco cover of the Canadian edition that I was able to get would not inspire me at all. Ironically, we also judge a book by its cover.
“There’s something too advertisement-slick about the U.S. version, while the British version has a dark playfulness that I like.”
Is that meant to be a joke? The U.S. cover for 1Q84 is one of the best things the novel has going for it. Chip Kidd made a brilliant design.
The top three American versions seem more sinister than the UK versions. I love the UK version of The Cat’s Table–the American one almost seems like a non-fiction history book or something.
I wouldn’t buy the UK vs. of The Art of Fielding because I have a ridiculous aversion to anything chalkboard. Bad reason not to buy a book? You betcha. Yet, it’s true! And why, why has a dog been shot and is bleeding mustard in the US vs. of The Devil All the Time??
This is very cool, and it makes me appreciate the trouble my publisher went through to get the cover for my book just right.
Always enjoy this feature. One of the ToB finalists you didn’t include, The Sisters Brothers, was probably my favorite cover of 2011. No surprise they basically kept it the same for the UK release.
The American Art of Fielding cover was another of my favorites – the throwback baseball font is terrific.
I disagree with your assessment of “1Q84,” since Chip Kidd’s design was the tipping factor in buying the book in the first place. (So I’m sure Knopf is happy about that one.) Especially considering the layering of the jacket and cover and the images over images. The U.K. one sees more generic to me. And I like the US “Marriage Plot” mostly because I think Rodrigo Corral makes interesting covers.
But what about Swamplandia! ? (Which the U.S. has over the U.K.)
My favorite ToB title Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl isn’t included! I don’t think the U.K. version is different, but the book takes place in London!
Arturo Ulises,
Are you saying that the top graphic designer in the business, making a cover for one of the larger books of the year, isn’t advertising slick? I love Kidd in general, but really, his Murakami covers are pretty much his worst work.
@jecqueline dubois
Most of these books are published by different publishing houses in different countries, so when the house gets the rights for the book, they often look at how it sold and if they feel they can improve upon the cover or make it pop more for the demographic they are trying to reach, not to mention whether they want to pay for the rights to the original artwork.
Many times it’s just cheaper to redesign a cover in-house and the designer will retain elements that they feel worked well on the original cover, as in those for OPEN CITY and THE ART OF FIELDING, which have fairly similar design choices.
I’m going to agree with Matt and Arturo–I think the American 1Q84 is great. Definitely better than the UK cover, which looks really busy.
Also, I think both State of Wonder covers are terrible, but especially the American one. It looks so bland and generic! I’ve heard good things about the book, but you’d never know it from that cover. I don’t know why, but Ann Patchett seems to get a lot of bad covers.
I hate the US cover of “Devil All the Time” — it looks like a giant turkey when I glance at it too quickly.
I got to say, I do actually prefer the red and yellow Open City far more. It’s a more intense color combo.
While in the UK this summer, I observed this habit first hand. I was instantly attracted to the beautiful covers of Cloud Atlas and The Hare with the Amber Eyes. Upon returning to the US and seeing the American cover to The Hare with the Amber Eyes, I deeply regretted not purchasing it while in the UK. Food doesn’t have to be be attractive to taste great but when it is, it can lead one to salivate.
The British version of the Marriage Plot looks like an airport book…….
Please tell me that’s not two different people named “David” and that he is having a laugh. The article is about different covers of books between US and UK editions, and David takes issue with the omission of two books which, by his own admission, were published in both countries with the same cover?
Reading is fundamental.
I don’t mind the visual design of 1Q84, but as a bookseller, I hate the thin mylar cover. Gets torn and creased all the time, and certainly wasn’t designed for longevity…
Either cover, 1Q84 is a terrible novel.
I love the side-by-side comparisons. I find it so interesting that books have different covers to supposedly appeal to different countries. Do movie posters do the same?
Here, I mostly get the same sense of the book from each cover – perhaps I’d think the story was a shade darker in some cases. Maybe the only exception would be IQ84 as they are so different.
First off, I think it’s certainly an interesting topic. As a bookseller, as well as a mildly (ok wildly) addicted reader/buyer of books, I know the importance of great design in encouraging someone to pick something up for a closer look. Personally, I love the 1Q84 cover design, although I empathize with Emily Pullen’s point about the fragile jacket (which I think is vellum, but whatever). Glancing at my shelves I can list several books that I was first prompted to look at a little more closely just because of the covers. Luminarium by Alex Shakar (although I remembered his great piece here as well when I saw the name) and A Visit From the Goon Squad being two examples. What I do find weird is that sometimes in Canada, we get UK editions, or international (read: not American) trade paperback versions, and sometimes we get the US ones. I’ve bought books in other countries just to get different versions, and once had an author send me a UK version (unprompted, but most appreciated) after I wrote him a fan letter. The bottom line is, in my opinion, that attractive book design leads to more physical book sales. Which, as a bookseller and buyer, makes me happy.
A thousand agreements to Emily and her discontent over 1Q84’s fragile dust cover. Visually, it’s a great design, pretty much the best part of the horrid book, but it’s not practical: at my bookstore we struggled to keep it pristine, a doomed battle from the start as a healthy portion of them arrived to us already bent or wrinkled from shipping. I personally lost at least one sale to this poor design choice–frustrating.
Have you seen the Canadian cover for The Cat’s Table? It’s one of the instances where they chose a different route from both the UK and US co-publishers. It’s got a softer, more historical archive quality to it.
Personally, I can’t stand the US design. The UK’s effort was better, but I’m not sure any one company got it right.
I am not a Chip Kidd fan. I agree his design was too advertorial, too slick. And from a production standpoint, it was a pain in the ass to get the registration right on the case wrap and jacket.
I sometimes buy the UK version of book over the American because of the cover art. The latest cover that bothers my aesthetic sense if for a non-fiction book, “Quiet,” by Susan Cain. I like the white, understated British edition, featuring a small speech bubble that holds the title. The American edition, however, is a schmeary gray background, with the title in red. Ugly, ugly, ugly.
I’m actually reading The Devil All the Time right now, and now that I’ve looked at the cover more closely, I think I’ve finally figured it out—it seems like it’s channeling the opening credits of the TV show True Blood.
In general, I’m not sure British publishers really want to sell books at all. So many of their covers are numbly blank, if not actively screaming “this book is a load of crap” (apologies to Larkin).
Can someone explain why practically all of the American covers have the novel’s title followed by ‘a novel’? Do we really need to be told the novel in front of us is a novel??
Personally I find those black bands on the US versions infuriating – I want to see what’s behind them! But then I’m a Brit…
Always enjoy these comparisons. Reminds me of the time I was a UK bookseller transplanted to Michigan for a few months. At the start I was unable to find any of the books that I knew so well in their US camouflage. By the end of course I’d switched back, and couldn’t find half of the stock at a glance when I got home.
For my tuppence… the Eugenides cover is better in US version (the font wins) but I wish it had the flies. The Murakami US cover is horrible, I’m amazed that it’s Chip Kidd. Maybe it’s better in the flesh. The UK version is fine, but the red brush strokes on the actual cover beneath the dustjacket are really quite nice.
I was disappointed with the writing of both novels however!
The (US) cover of STATE OF WONDER actually kept me from taking it out on at least three separate visits to the library. I finally gave in when it was named to so many lists, incl. the Rooster. The UK one is about equally terrible, though.
I’m not sure anybody mentioned that the wedding band on the American version of The Wedding Plot is a Mobius strip.
Off topic, but are we about done now with the “The So-and-So’s Female Relative” format for novel titles?
This was the first time I have ever read this column and I found it very interesting. As an artist and a reader I have always attached a great deal of importance to the covers of books, and everything else for sale. I tend to be more attracted to book covers that are illustrated by hand. This does not preclude intriguing photographs done with an artist’s eye. I also have come to appreciate fonts as an important design element. It is hard to judge the covers without knowing the contents, as the main purpose of the cover is to convey and enhance the author’s intention (ideally) and to get the book into the hands of the public. I did not agree with all the assessments, but for the most part, and from the perspective of one ignorant of the contents, I did agree with your judgments.
I think in the case of Julian Barnes he is more well known in the UK and most of his book covers here seem to use a similar font. I think this explains the text-based cover on The Sense of an Ending; it’s a branding exercise that works on UK book buyers in a way that it wouldn’t in the US.
I do this meme on my blog. I agree with most of your picks. It amazes me how the US and UK covers always differ. It seems covers appeal differently to readers depending on their residence.
I iive in Tokyo, so in bookstores I often can choose between US, UK, and International version covers! If I do not know anything about the book or author, sometimes I buy purely on jacket design (the Japanese word for this is “jyake-gai” literally “jacket buy” though more used for buying music). For IQ84, I picked Chip Kidd: yes very slick but the layers were great. The Japanese version was very bland, the UK a bit too dark. I did not know the vellum cover would be so troublesome to the bookstores, but I liked how the book theme was continued in the page number placement. Loved the UK covers of The Tiger’s Wife and The Cat’s Table. More next year, please!
Personally, I don’t think the “average” reader gives a fig about the cover being accurate to the book. As long as it’s eye catching and sells sex or violence it’ll sell. I also think that some, if not most, of the covers on all the books compared are bland. I feel you are reading too much into things like a black band suggesting something important being hidden. Then, again, I’m just an “average” reader.
The British version of Julian Barnes’ novel reminds me of Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love cover. Her was blue, but the type is the same and is the right formatting. I like how the British version seems to fade and play tricks with your eyes, however.
Are most of you guys American? I’m English and find the ‘bland’ covers (that so many of you dislike) often more appealing than the American alternatives, which tend to look a bit strange to me. Clearly the people in charge of choosing the covers understand their market well!
The Art of Fielding is an interesting one. Having read the comment re baseball, I understand why you guys like it better, but before reading that, I thought it just looked colourful and oddly loopy, whereas the British cover instantly put me in mind of old-fashioned summers playing cricket. So clearly the cover conveyed the correct feeling adjusted for the relevant market.
Great post. We didn’t agree on most of the covers, but I did enjoy your perspective. Made me take a second…and sometimes a third look in determining what motivates me to pick a particluar book up for a closer look.
I’m from the US and prefer the covers marketed towards us! Except for The Tiger’s Wife and The Cat’s Table…
i recently purchased The Marriage Plot here in Amsterdam, and I love this cover. I was pleasantly surprised that it was different than the covers I had seen previously. I didn’t even realize it was different for a reason, as in, there are different covers for US books & European/UK versions.
I just moved to AMS 6 months ago, so needless to say I am still learning & adjusting to all the differences.
interesting post, good read.
Interesting analysis. Authors, in general, do not have much say about their covers. I was shown covers to all of my novels and nonfiction books, but did not really have veto power. The ultimate call was my publisher’s. In contrast, Kindle can give authors that power. I decided to keep the cover for my “author’s cut” of The Silk Code exactly the same for the US and the UK – because I like the cover so much, and think it has universal appeal. See this discussion about judging books by their covers for more http://karensdifferentcorners.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-part-3-cont-and-5-more-covers/#comment-1040
I will design my own covers, the covers will help me with my fictional novel i am working on. thanks for this post.
A great article and just goes to show the subtle changes that you’ll see from within cultures which share a great many similarities. I work on covers for authors from both sides of the pond ( you can see examples here http://www.jdandj.com ) and have found that when working directly with the authors most of the time their needs and expectations have stayed very close regardless off nationality.