I rebranded my Moriarty series last year, which mostly means redesigning the covers. I love my cover creator, but I wanted a fresh take on the whole situation, so I hired the amazing Jane Ryder of Ryder Author Resources to study the scene with me. We spent quality time (on my ticket) browsing images: Victorian mysteries at Amazon, Victorian sensation novels in the British Library online catalogue, and endless Google image searches for things like “nineteenth century painting man on stage,” which yielded zilch. (It’s hard to find images of sufficient quality for a paperback.)
In olden days
A book cover, according to Wikipedia, is “any protective covering used to bind together the pages of a book.” The article notes that books were originally handwritten on parchment, so that each page was an expensive item. The covers, often luxuriously decorated with leather or velvet, with gilding and even jewels, were meant to protect those precious pages and keep them together.
Obvious, you say; but not any more. Where are the pages being protected in the digital books I’m mostly concerned about? I sell paperbacks too, but my covers are chiefly designed to catch the eye, not entice the fingers. They’re attractive images which serve no tangible purpose. I rarely look at the cover of the books on my Kindle, once I’ve downloaded them. They don’t look like much in black and white anyway.
The dawn of the popular
Along comes the printing press, and that stack of paper isn’t so valuable in and of itself. What’s wanted is quantity. It’s not the publisher’s job to make sure the product will survive for centuries, so now we get covers of simple printed pasteboard. They might be covered with thin leather and sewn closely for a more expensive volume. But more often they’re pretty flimsy, like modern paperbacks.
You’d enter the shop and flip open the cover to read the frontispiece, which is where the marketing happened. Consider these favorite examples.
Onward, into the recent past
You have to have lots of readers as well as lots of paper to produce a truly popular press. So let’s fast-forward to the late Victorian period, after the new and improved public school program (the Elementary Education Act of 1870) has pushed literacy out to the masses.
Are the masses clamoring for an updated copy of Francis Bacon’s Great Instauration in Latin? No, they most emphatically are not. What they want is sensation, thrills and chills. They want tales of romance thwarted and won, great battles, and strange occurrences. They want action and feeling!
Scholars of literature date the novel from the early 18th century. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, was written by Samuel Richardson in 1740. I recently tried to read another early novel – Daniel Defoe’s 1724 Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress – but I got bored and gave up. I should’ve read the blurb. I didn’t know there was a murder in it! (Wait. 1724 is before 1740. Isn’t Roxana a novel? Also, I think Thomas Nashe’s 1594 The Unfortunate Traveler is a novel. That one is a fun read, if you don’t mind early modern English. But I’m not qualified to define the term. I just write the silly things.)
Genre fiction
These days, ‘genre’ means ‘fiction that falls into one of several recognizable categories.’ Romance was the first, but by the late nineteenth century we also have crime (mystery, thriller, suspense), fantasy, science fiction, westerns, and horror. The list at Wikipedia includes inspirational as a genre, but I think that’s more mid-20th century. Before mid-nineteenth century, all literary fiction was supposed to be uplifting.
But we don’t care about that. We’re looking at covers! Many of the ones you find if you search for “Victorian era book covers” are practical, sturdy, leather-bound volumes that look like they were meant for the burgeoning library trade. You probably knew which book you wanted when you went in. You’d fill out a slip at the desk and the librarian would go get it for you. You’d ask the librarian to suggest something or check out whatever your friends were reading. You might get a recommendation from your newspaper, but you wouldn’t care a fig about the cover art.
But what if you’re browsing in a bookstore for a gift? Then the cover matters. Also, let’s remember that the Victorians invented advertising, in the sense of big, eye-catching images with bald-faced lies printed around them. Perfect for fiction!
Here’s sampling of what we might have found.
Spring-Heeled Jack was only a penny! That wasn’t a lot even back then. I would have read those books by the barrow-load.
The Haunted House in Berkeley Square — actually, all of the late Victorian examples — display the characteristics of a modern cover. Modern literary covers can be very abstract, but for genre fiction, it’s still most commonly a frame of some sort in which the title and author’s name are displayed. Then we have the compelling central image that gives us an instant sense of what kind of ride this book will give us. Moody and dark, for the Haunted House. Exciting, non-stop action for Jack. These books put the publisher on the front and even the price for penny dreadfuls, but I don’t see any puff quotes. Guess Stephen King wasn’t around yet to tell us what a heart-pounding read it is.
A Walk through the Covers of Time
We can easily observe the changing taste in book covers by looking at everybody’s favorite lady novelist, Jane Austen. The first one is undated, but looks like others from the late 18th century. Then we have a sensational one from the Age of Sensation, 1870. Then a milder one from 1946. Then one from probably the 1980s, when we’re reading Jane because we have to for class. Then comes the whole Jane Reboot with movie after movie (all of which I’ve watched and loved, except for anything with Keira Knightley in it.
The Quandary
The quandary for me was which direction to go in for my covers. Not all the way to early c18, definitely. But neither did I wish to get into the full abstraction of literary fiction in c21. I don’t write literary fiction and my name won’t sell a book on its own. My covers need images that give a good sense of content.
I would have loved to go full Victorian, but it’s hard to find images are of sufficient quality for a print cover that also relate to my story. I spent a LOT of time grazing for images. I even considered commissioning some original art, but that’s out of my reach.
If you want to see all the images that fed this process, tune in to my Pinterest board.
Anna Castle, March 23, 2020
