Anyone who has ever gone to the bookstore with me knows that I love covers. So when Tash and I decided to dive into The Handmaid’s Tale last month, one of the first things I did was pull the cover images. The covers a book goes through says a lot, both about the story the publisher thinks its telling, and the audience it thinks it’s selling to.
First published by the Canadian McClelland and Stewart in 1985, the original cover is cubist bold, colorful, and utterly grotesque. The main character, Offred’s relationship with the Commander takes center stage, and it’s damn uncomfortable to look at. One year later, the iconic U.S. first edition from Houghton Mifflin came out, and the world hasn’t been the same since.
Fast-forwarding to today: While the 1985 handmaids-by-the-wall cover is still, by far, the most common and recognizeable, the 2006 release from McClelland & Stewart went in an airy direction, the 2009 went full on body parts (a common enough tactic in YA, and part of a long-standing tradition of representing women through body parts: the arm, the hand, the legs, the neck and chin. The most recent re-release from 2010 Vintage Classics, though, the last in the images above, bucked the trend by going full conceptual.
Some books pivoted away from both the literal depiction of what happened in any given scene to a more symbolic representation.
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This month, we decided to go in the Teen Alien Invasion Romance direction and tackle Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave. After all, the movie version just came out, it’s streaming on Amazon, AND the trailer promises an alien invasion with aliens taking over human brains. Who’s infested? Who’s still human? NO ONE KNOWS.
The Book Canaries 