Wow! Gabe Habash at Publishers weekly has a fascinating article about a very Strange cover he found on The Shining.
I've posted, with permission, the first bit of the article. Be sure to check the whole thing out at publishersweekly.com.
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About a month ago, I was searching for something Stephen King-related to put on this fantastic blog. Scrolling down through rows and rows of Google images for The Shining, most of them screengrabs of Nicholson and the pre-chopped-up girls in the hallway, I saw, in thumbnail size, the above cover for O Iluminado. It looked strikingly similar to an 80s Pantene ad.
I saved the cover on my desktop, knowing I wanted to share it with you all in some way, but not sure how. For weeks, I’d open the file and stare into O Iluminado‘s eyes, and then into her smaller set of eyes. I would look at it for so long it would change; I named the mysterious woman Flavia; she became strange to me and then familiar in her strangeness. I had so many questions.
Who is Flavia? In what public place is she on the cover? Why is she also in a little window?
But let us parse why this book cover is either the worst book cover ever or, perhaps, the most brilliant book cover ever.
The tale of this thing’s creation begins in Brazil with Grupo Editorial Record, the largest publishing conglomerate in Latin America, founded in 1940. We’ll fast forward through the dry publishing history, but it’s important to note that Record has published authors like Márquez and Hemingway (and, of course, King), and that it publishes covers that look like this:
The point I’m trying to make here is that Grupo Editorial Record is capable of making covers that, you know, make sense. When I was doing the research on them, trying to find other nonsense covers, I thought maybe I’d find other Record covers with Flavia’s likeness–maybe she was Record’s mascot and maybe different covers had Flavia doing different things, posing in various ways, like how Keebler sticks the leader Keebler elf on different cookie packages in different celebratory positions. But when I found out Record’s other covers were normal, I was, at first, disappointed that there wasn’t some rogue publisher in South America challenging the world to make sense of its covers. But then, because of its singularity, the O Iluminado cover became even more incredible to me.
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Okay. . . are you intrigued? I was.
For the rest of the post, head over to PWxyz
(When you read the article be sure to also read the comments section -- there are answers!)
Also check out my article bad-spanish-book-covers and book covers that annoy
