Monday, November 3, 2008

Even The New York Times has something to say about copycat covers...

As you probably already know, I’m fascinated by books with similar covers. It turns out that back in 2005, Andrew Adam Newman commented on this phenomenon in The New York Times, pointing out the resemblance between the covers to The Task of This Translator by Todd Hasak-Lowy, Wearing Dad’s Head by Barry Yourgrau and The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (all pictured below), as well as providing examples of books that used the exact same images on their covers. Newman said:
When a book hits stores with a cover nearly identical to another’s, it’s the publishing equivalent of arriving at a party wearing the same dress as the hostess. But while book jacket look-alikes may chafe publishers, it happens more often than you might think.


After I prepared this post, I noticed that Sheri at Bookopolis had already posted about this article in a post entitled Book Cover Faux-Pas. Apologies, then, to those who read both our blogs and have seen this twice!

Edited to add:
Here are a few more covers that feature a similar bowler hat: Rubies in the Orchard by Lynda Resnick, Negotiating Perfection by Allan Fox, The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks.



As I mentioned in the comments (and as is mentioned in the article), all of these hat covers are inspired by Magritte’s paintings.

16 comments:

  1. I love your similar covers posts. Keep 'em coming.

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  2. I have that Unbearable Lightness of Being but hadn't seen the others.

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  3. Yay, thanks for the encouragement, Kathy!

    Lenore, I figured that even if you'd seen the post on Bookopolis, at least the covers we posted were different! According to the article, all these hats covers are inspired by Magritte's paintings, such as this one.

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  4. Yeah I was gonna come say those are based on an artist's work but you already said that LOL!

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  5. I also love these types of posts, and for a national newspaper to cover it, you know it's happening a lot.

    --Anna
    Diary of an Eccentric

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  6. Alea, sorry that my post turned out to be one you'd seen before!

    Anna, yeah, that's what I figured. Plus there are definitely quite a few bloggers out there posting about this phenomenon...

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  7. No that wasn't it! I was just going to make the same comment you did in the comments about them all being inspired by that one artist, hehe. Haven't see all these lookalikes. I couldn't remember his name even though LOL!

    I feel like there might be one of his pieces in one of my local museums but i might be confusing him with someone else!

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  8. The first two are almost identical!!!

    Shana
    Literarily

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  9. You've got a great memory, to be able to pull the two (or more) books together. I've seen similar covers and thought "that looks like ...." (and can't think of the look-alike book!)

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  10. I've seen a lot of posts about this but I haven't personally picked up a look-alike yet. It's got to annoying though!!!

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  11. Alea, sorry my comment was confusing, I just meant that you'd seen this article mentioned before on Bookshipper's blog -- I wasn't responding to your previous comment here!

    Tara, Shana, Dawn and Ladytink, I can't take credit for finding these lookalikes this time! The guy who wrote the article in the New York Times is actually the person who spotted them; I just found the actual covers for you... What's interesting is that the first two covers are almost identical to the Magritte painting, down to the colour of the guy's tie and everything.

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  12. Apparently my memory is going I don't even remember seeing it before haha. I must get some sleep :P

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  13. Yeah, me too! I just emailed you about this because it's been a while and I didn't want us to misunderstand each other!

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  14. I have another different cover of the Unbearable Lightness of Being, but still with the same bowler hat. I love your posts on similar covers! :)

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  15. Thanks, Claire! It's become a bit of an obsession, although it's been a while since I've done one of these posts!

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