When Bad Book Covers Happen to Good Books: Making Sense of It All.

Sometimes, when you're browsing in a bookstore, you'll come across a really good-looking book.

"Hey good-looking," you'll say to the book. "Let's go have a coffee, and then go back to my place and curl up together on a rainy day."

To which the book will not reply, not so much because you're being a superficial jerk(ette), but because it is an inanimate object.

However, I've been struck in the past few years by some horrendously bad book cover choices. Choices which seem to have been made by the publisher while he/she was either drunk, high, or trying to get fired.

Let's take a look at the top three:

Waverly by Sir Walter Scott. (Oxford World's Classics edition)


Scott's first novel follows the adventures of the heroic Edward Waverly: an English soldier sent to to the highlands of Scotland, where he joins the Jacobites in an attempt to restore Prince Charles Edward Stuart to the throne.

And of course, from the cover-page, we can tell that Edward Waverly is one hot studmuffin of a man: rosy cheeks, ruby lips, and all.












Bleak House by Charles Dickens (Oxford World's Classics edition)



When I purchased this book at Books Kinokuniya in Singapore, it was less than half the price of the surrounding Dickensian novels such as Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities. A veritable steal!

Of course, perhaps it was the unappealing look of the book which had something to do with it. When a book is 900 pages long and has a depressing title like Bleak House, the last thing you want to do is slap a picture of a kid dozing (out of boredom?) on the cover.

The blurb is intriguing: "It is a murder story....It is a murder story, which comes to a climax in a thrilling chase.....And it is a fable about redemption."

The cover is...bleak.



Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (Riverside edition)

The longest book ever written in the English language, and written entirely in the form of letter-exchanges. This book is about the breathtakingly beautiful and virtuous Clarissa, and the villainous Richard Lovelace who loves her so much that he wants to seduce her, trample all over her virtue, and make her a fallen woman.

"I can think of nothing, of nobody, but my divine Clarissa Harlowe....O thou most exalted of female minds, and loveliest of persons!" Lovelace writes. Can she really be that lovely?



















Indeed, she is. Albeit a bit on the stout and manly side. And the wig and the overly-prominent beauty mark just aren't doing it for her. Granted, the picture is probably supposed to be of Samuel Richardson, but seriously, let me ask you. WHY???!? WHY??!? AGGGH! MY EYES!!!