Something I don’t see much any more on book covers is written copy. If there is any, it’s usually a blurb — “If you like Harry Dresden and Anita Blake, you’ll love battle-mage Brandon Bandersnatch” or proclaim the writer is a “best-selling author” on Amazon or some other list So many authors make this claim I figure they’re either lying or best-sellers in a very narrow subgenre, like a 1980s book whose cover copy called it “the finest novel ever written about life in a successful Beverly Hills fashion boutique.”
Older paperbacks made more effective use of cover copy. Consider Barye Phillips’ cover for a Gardner Fox crime novel for instance.
Phillips gives us a good image but of what? Is the woman tired, in danger, grieving? A witness, a killer, a target? The cover copy doesn’t tell us but it does set up an interesting situation.
Next look at this Robert McGinnis cover
The image is stock hardboiled stuff, not up to McGinnis’ best work (for more of which see here). But the copy makes it a lot more interesting.
It works in speculative fiction too, as witness this Darrell Sweet cover.
The hard-drinking devil would make this interesting in any case. The copy makes it more so (and the book is fun too, the only one of these I’ve read).
Maybe it’s no great loss. When people buy online, there’s Amazon’s (or whoever’s) What This Book Is About material to read. Small paperbacks are going extinct as there’s more money in the larger trade paperbacks. But I still enjoy looking at the old books that have ’em.
