Links: larger women and book covers, the popularity of youth lit, and dads reading to daughters

In a delightful bit of crossover, Gwen over at Sociological Images rounds up a bunch of covers of books about larger girls, most of whom don’t look that big on the cover. There’s also been some discussion about how the women on these covers are mostly disembodied parts–common in advertising (see here, here, and here for examples)–but there’s also been counter-discussion positing that it’s because publishers think that women want to be able to identify with characters and that’s harder when you can see their face. I’m not sure I buy that; I’d like to see a study sampling books with covers depicting men and covers depicting women that determines if there is a gender difference in whether or not faces are shown. And what about YA book covers?

Susan Carpenter writes for the LA Times about the rising popularity of YA lit among adults. She addresses the increasing sales of youth lit in general (“Where adult hardcover sales were down 17.8% for the first half of 2009 versus the same period in 2008, children’s/young adult hardcovers were up 30.7%.”), acknowledges the rise in critical acclaim for youth lit, and points to the growing number of movies based off of books for teens and children (my husband and I are finally going to go see the Percy Jackson movie this weekend!). She also makes the great point that current YA writers grew up when YA books were finally starting to mature:

Many of today’s young adult authors were born and raised in the 1960s and 1970s, when YA began to move beyond the staid, emotionless tales of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys in favor of more adventurous work from Judy Blume, Madeleine L’Engle and Robert Cormier. Now, they’re turning out their own modern masterpieces.

And finally, Lee Wind of I’m Here. I’m Queer. Now what the Hell do I read? has a post about reading with his daughter and what other dads need to know about reading with their own daughters. He paints a beautiful picture of a household full of readers and also touches on dialogic reading, which we’ve been talking about in my Youth Services class recently. I also love how he gets to the heart of why, beyond developmental and literacy-related reasons, reading with kids is so great: “Reading is the doorway to a Shared experience with your kid. Don’t just read it TO her. Experience it WITH her.”

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3 Comments March 11, 2010

The Chinese cover of THE GRAVEYARD BOOK

On Sunday Neil Gaiman tweeted about the Chinese cover of THE GRAVEYARD BOOK.

The Chinese cover of Neil Gaiman's THE GRAVEYARD BOOK

I love the selective use of color and the texture. It’s interesting to see what got carried over from the American cover, most notably the silhouette of Bod (confession: it took me ages to see that in the headstone). Actually, check out all of the different covers at Gaiman’s official site. Some are more graveyardy, some are more Victorian, some are more fairy tale, some are more spooky. What a great variation. I especially like the Italian cover. Although the one from Poland is pretty great, too. Honestly, I think the American cover is sort of boring in comparison!

Anyway, back to China. In the summer of 2007, the Chinese government banned the depiction of skeletons in the MMORPG World of Warcraft. The Chinese company licensed to operate WoW in China complied, adding flesh to the undead characters and replacing the bodies of players with graves. Given this, I think the Chinese cover of THE GRAVEYARD BOOK is even more interesting. The ghosts shown are cartoonish, very different from the spooky figures on the Polish cover, and there is no knife like the one in this sketch Dave McKean did for the original cover selection process or even the Italian cover.

But what is curiously present is a cross on the grave marker in the lower left corner. While restrictions on religion have loosened since the 1980s and Christianity may be on the rise in China, religion in general is required to operate within strict boundaries. Both the Catholic church and the Protestant church in China are run by government-approved organizations and worship or Bible study outside of those approved churches is illegal. One of the girls from my residence hall in college spent a summer evangelizing in China and had to be very careful about what she included in her emails home. (Please note I am not supporting illegal proselytizing in China, just mentioning it as something that happens.)

While THE GRAVEYARD BOOK takes place in England, and in a Christian cemetery specifically, I was still surprised by the presence of a cross on the cover. Are you?

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3 Comments March 4, 2010

Hunger Games book 3 cover announced (and more on book covers)

The cover and title for the third book in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy, MOCKINGJAY, was announced today!

I was a little disappointed with the second book, but I’m really excited to see how the trilogy wraps up. I like that the three covers tell a story themselves of darkness, rebellion, and… hope? victory? but I’m not sure about the color. It seems a little too cheerful, and I wonder if the cover as a whole will look girly to teen boys. In any case, though, I am super-pumped for the end of August to arrive! (There won’t be ARCs at Annual because Scholastic doesn’t need to promote the book or the series–at least, that’s what Dean Irwin reported to us after going to Midwinter.)

I’ve been thinking about book covers a lot recently. There was a lengthy discussion on the listservs recently about the whitewashing of covers at Bloomsbury, there was a recent post over at The YA YA YAs about that mentioned dystopian novels having covers with girls’ hair flying around on them, and last spring I came across a blog post by the person who designed the cover of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ISLAND talking about his thought process during the design and showing some of the ideas he didn’t use. And of course, there’s always Jacket Whys for frequent pictures and thoughts on children’s and YA book covers.

Books circ better when they’re displayed face-out (this comes up a lot in class discussions when someone mentions bookstores) because people do judge books by their covers, and seeing the cover lets you get to know the book better than just seeing the spine. But beyond that, I’m interested in what about book covers makes a book more popular, or more likely to get checked out, or just more likely to catch someone’s eye, and how those characteristics have changed over time (remember all those horrible “realistic” covers on historical fiction from the 80s and 90s?).

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1 Comment February 11, 2010