Bad Cover (Not Bands)

"Oh those Greeks!  They knew how to how to live.  What is required is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance.  Those Greeks were superficial--out of profundity.  And is not this precisely what we are again coming back to, we daredevils of the spirit who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of present thought and looked around from up there--we who have looked down from there?  Are we not, precisely in this respect, Greeks? Adorers of forms, of tones, of words?"

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

A cover should beckon; it should invite the reader to stay (and a great one will remind the reader to return, to revisit)--it should provide a dwelling for the reader.  Nothing could be more baleful than a disquieting, repulsive cover: for it will not find a reader for its signs and signifieds.

A cover should touch, be touching, and in turn, should be touched.  If a cover is not touching it will not be touched; except, perhaps, in a harmful way.

This is not a fantastic cover; I know Scandinavian death metal bands that wouldn't allow this to pass for a cover.  This is not a ponderous, poetic cover that summons pale, brooding Romantics either.

The hooded figure is not striking, but forgettable and misplaced.  He looks like he should be on a Star Wars cover, not an inclement plain.  Moreover, the plain scene seems like it is a lost slide from the Lion King, and not a novel sort of high fantasy.

The dominant color scheme vividly washes the cover in Shakespearean "pale fire" and the blues, grays, whites, and blacks play with and off of each other to an aesthetically delightful effect.  However, this is ruined by the hideous font and font color of the title.  The title font is slender and pointed, and is reminiscent of the most bland and boring font ever made, and which haunts tepid high school term papers: the villainous Times New Roman.  Few fonts have the stifling power of Times New Roman, and this font is one of them.  Times New Roman must figure prominently in any ode to boredom, mediocrity, and the quotidian, and the title font selected for The Name of the Wind must read such odes with large envy.

Ultimately, the cover is for wraiths and shadows, but even such things must find this cover too ghoulish to tolerate.

Books You SHOULD Buy For Their Covers

After becoming engrossed by the imagery of the cover for Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora, I decided to do some digging for books that I would buy simply because of their covers.  There are a lot of interesting pictures for Science Fiction and Fantasy covers, but many of them are forgettable, confused, or simply boring.  To my mind, this is a really terrible artistic loss, or loss of artistic opportunity, since I would imagine of all the readers, Science Fiction and Fantasy audiences are in the most ideal position to fully appreciate imaginative cover art.  The few titles I have listed here are by no means exhaustive, but range from the comic (Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters) to the pensive (Lies of Locke Lamora).

I was hoping to find some really potent, high fantasy covers, but the closest I could find was Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.  To my dismay, many of the genuinely fantastic covers from the Dragonlance series that I read as a child have been reissued with new, less exciting (less fantastic) covers.



Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters



Jane Slayre



The Lies of Locke Lamora



Before They Are Hanged (The First Law: Book Two)



Lamentation



Canticle (The Psalms of Isaak)



The Dragon Reborn: Book Three of 'The Wheel of Time'



Crossroads of Twilight (Wheel of Time, Book 10)



The Eye of the World (The Wheel of Time, Book 1)