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Fiction Friction: The Transatlantic Divide in Fantasy Covers

Discuss this article by @Thande here

Apologies for the delay on this going up, I was doing breathing apparatus training in a fire station yesterday and had no access to a computer.
No problem Gary.

I've realised this is a potentially rich vein in future articles, as well as discovering that a number of people who make reading-related Youtube videos have had the same idea.
 
I have a collection of Joe Abercrombie's books and they're almost all from here, so they have a similar format of papers and maps and blood & damage:

81FnTl6wZPL.jpg

except this is where the US had the same covers, but two years later one got a fresh reprint in the UK where it's...a brooding royal guy, not really establishing a tone but look it has got a fantasy Europe in it:

51++pLVQyJL.jpg


Until I just saw NOW this is a UK cover, I thought it was an American one! Because it just looks like it's an American one, doesn't it?

The original UK and US covers aren't the best covers ever but they are selling a different book than this one, despite being the SAME book.

Except now the recent UK reprint has done that 'minimalist reprint the same Jordan rings' style and now it doesn't look at all like the sort of book it is:

615aPmWdiTL._SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_ML2_.jpg


That looks austere, classic, semi-noble, even less the book than the US cover.

Meanwhile the more recent US cover is this:

51JOQod4J1L._SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_ML2_.jpg


which looks a bit nasty and grungy, and thus is the best and most fitting cover yet.
 
French book covers also tend towards the minimalistic. When I first went to the US in 1990, and as a nerdy teenager spent a lot of time in bookstores, the covers of American books struck me as garish. Sometimes the very titles would be in bas-relief.

This, for example, was the cover of the French edition of Fahrenheit 451 I read in high school.

fahr.jpeg
 
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French book covers also tend towards the minimalistic. When I first went to the US in 1990, and as a nerdy teenager spent a lot of time in bookstores, the covers of American books struck me as garish. Sometimes the very titles would be in bas-relief.

This, for example, was the cover of the French edition of Fahrenheit 451 I read in high school.

fahr.jpeg
That's an interesting combination as it's minimalistic but also 1970s - not too dissimilar to some British editions from the same decade, but usually it wouldn't be reduced to a vignette on ours.
 
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