Back in the 1960s John Hershey published a now largely forgotten novel called White Lotus, wherin the US is conquered by the Chinese. If you look at the Amazon page cited you will see it with a red cover. However, at the time the publisher released the paperback in two versions, one with the red cover and another with the same illustration on a white background. The theory was that people familiar with Hershey's work would be attracted by the white version where his name leaps out, while people unfamiliar with his work would be attracted by the more sensual red color. So I suppose if you were seen reading the red one on the subway we would consider you a philistine, while white cover readers were the intellectual elite. Unfortunately I can't find any reports as to which color sold more copies.
So were you listening to this version of that song while you wrote this up, Gerry?
As far as the covers go, a "new coat of paint" has been an industry standard for books for several decades now. Think those cheap gardening, carpentry, and cooking books had a whole lot of time spent updating the content? Like the editors at Sunset or Readers Digest could give a shit, as long as the suckers keep buying the same crap every year. When it comes to fiction, though, a new cover is an indication that the book has made it to the Big Time. Only a few genre authors like Hammett or Chandler warrant reissues, which puts them in the same company as middle- and highbrow authors like Kerouac, say, or Jack London. Of course, getting on school reading lists doesn't hurt either-- it's hard to tell how many new covers The Scarlet Letter would require if the text wasn't, if you will.
From my location in the front lines of publishing, the real wickedness is less the "shocking" covers placed on classic titles, and more the warm fuzzy new covers on recycled crap-- and with a higher price tag to boot. Lindsay Sands, Patricia Gaffney, Nora Roberts even (though her problems run much deeper), and a slew of other names y'all probably don't know is what I have in mind, and is a signal both of the impact of digital books on publishers, and the effects of a terrible business model coming home to roost. But maybe ten years around the stacks has made me bitter and cynical about these things . . .
Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras
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Re: Covers
Wed Jul 04, 2012 at 03:42:19 PM EST
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Well, there has also been a lot of baloney going on with aknowleged classics. Some years ago I bought a Barnes & Nobel paperback of The Count of Monte Cristo. It had a nice cover with a 19th century painting, and a short introduction by a modern editor. It also hade a note that this was a 19th century translation to English, and the translators were not identified back then, so they had no idea. Fair enough.
Well, I read the thing, and it was the expected melodrama. However, I got to the end and never saw the famous episode where the Count bribes a semaphore operator to delay a vital message by an hour and thus effects the ruin of one of his enemies. The incident is referred to by somebody, but never presented. I was mystified and went through the indicia, the endpapers and the copyright page but could not find an explanation until I saw on the cover, way down in the corner and in 4-point type, the word "Abridged"! I was of course, furious. I also was surprised the Victorian translator would cut out the most famous episode in the book but leave in the minor lesbian subplot.
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Re: Covers
Wed Jul 04, 2012 at 06:02:01 PM EST
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If it's using the 1846 translation, then wouldn't the lesbian subplot have already been significantly cut? Since that's the standard translation that everyone is used to, if it's missing the semaphore bribery scene, doesn't that mean that it additional cuts were made by the publisher beyond those made by the translator? If they had published the full 1846 translation, wouldn't they have labeled it as "unabridged" despite the cuts made by the translator?
The fact that everyone continues to use the bad 1846 translation in spite of the availability of better ones would seem to me to be a demonstration of a significant failure of both copyright law and the publishing and bookselling businesses.
I was reading an article recently which noted that industry sales figures had recently started counting self-published books as part of the "traditional" publishing industry, with the implication being that retread publishing of out of copyright works had now grown large enough that any original content was now regarded as "traditional".
I almost always dislike it when a book I already like is re-issued with a different cover, but that's just being reactionary. Most of these books we're talking about here were never intended to be the proper classics that the 19th century painting covers make them look like they are. In that sense, the "sensationalized" covers are just a return to displaying the books they way they would have been viewed when they were originally published (despite whatever covers they appeared with back then), so I don't really see anything wrong with them.
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Re: Covers
Thu Jul 05, 2012 at 12:17:50 PM EST
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I don't know if copyright law has much to do with it, since Monte Cristo would be out from under copyright 100 years ago even under any imaginable regime. What it does say is that Barnes & Nobel were taking the cheapest way out to provide what looked like a nicely filled out Classics section. I wonder what other novels were butchered this way. The lack of any meaningful editorial overview is a more damning charge.
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Re: Covers
Thu Jul 05, 2012 at 08:41:42 PM EST
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The other translations are still under copyright, which is why they went with the 1846 version. Yeah, it does say something that they can't come up with a mutually beneficial agreement with the owner copyright of the other translations.
