Thursday 28 May 2009

Bad Stock Luck

Some authors don't seem to have a lot of luck when it comes to originality in their cover designs. One such is Deborah Lawrenson (who I've never read). When her The Art of Falling was republished in 2005, it ended up with a tinted version (with added castle and bombers) of a cover image used on a Penguin Classic of an excellent H. E. Bates book the previous year.




The same thing happened to this book's original cover: the same image as appeared on it (again with bombers added) has also been spotted on the cover of Thomas Cahill's Mysteries of the Middle Ages.




Then there's her most recent book, Songs of Blue and Gold, which has the same cover as the German edition of a novel by Stephanie Gertler.


5 comments:

Ian Koviak said...

what's amazing is that the crops are so similar.

Annabel Gaskell said...

Poor Deborah, her books are great reads by the way - especially Songs of Blue and Gold. I disliked the cover of that one as the location of the couple is just wrong for the book which is set in Corfu - they sunbathe on a rock set high over a blue cove.

JRSM said...

Ian: They're pretty much identical, aren't they?

Annabel: Given that they've photoshopped the background of the image anyway (changing the shoreline, adding mountains), perhaps they could have put them on a rock while they were at it. By the way, I hope you'll love the Elizabeth Taylor. She's brilliant.

The Bookaholic said...

Nice, nice covers and blog too! We have one thing in common: books...

JRSM said...

Thank you, Bookaholics! By the way, do you know of a good African internet bookshop that delivers internationally? There are lots of good African books that never get released over here. I've used Kalahari in the past, but only because they're the only ones I know of.