One of the most exciting parts of working at a used bookstore is seeing all of the different books that people bring in. Besides allowing me to see lots of different books, it also means I get to see even more book covers. You may be wondering how I'm seeing more cover designs than titles, but the answer is simple: alternate covers.
Most traditionally published books have at least a couple of cover designs thanks to the International market. It's usually cheaper to commission new cover art for a book than it is to pay for the rights to use another, so publishers around the world will often use different covers for the same book. There are plenty of other reasons for the divergence in covers than use rights, though. One is that people living in different parts of the world may have different tastes, both in terms of what they enjoy visually and in their stories. Sayaka Murata's Vanishing World is a book that's covers illustrate these differences.
The novel is set in a world where sex has become taboo and children are artificially conceived & raised communally, with no single parental figure to latch on to. The themes grounding the story are quite dark, but Murata approaches things with an imaginative flair that lends the story some lightness. The American release (left), with its overflowing tub of baby dolls, highlights the almost comedic absurdity of the situation. The UK edition (middle) has biblical imagery that seems to be referencing themes of conception & the price of pursuing the forbidden. The German cover (right) dials in on the story's underlying darkness.
The beauty of these book covers, and alternate book covers in general, is that no matter how much they differ they're all representations of the same text. One of the things that makes books special is their openness to interpretation, how two people can read the same words and be affected by them in completely different ways, and alternate book covers feel like the perfect visual metaphor for this.
The Classics section is another place where you'll find lots of different book covers, but for different reasons. The first is that many classics are in the public domain, meaning that anyone could print a copy and slap whatever they wanted on the cover. Most of the large publishers already have editions of older books in print, though, so you won't see as many of the Classics from smaller publishers.
This leads us to the second reason for the variety of covers in Classics, which is that there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Different publishers will all put out editions of the same text, so a distinct cover is a good way to make an edition stand out without altering the content.
Additionally, because many classics are quite widely read & people already have an idea of what they're getting into when they pick up the book, classics covers can afford to be a little more abstract. Penguin's cover's are a good example of this abstraction, where they'll simply feature a painting, usually tangentially related to the text, the book's title, and the name of the author.
Fitzcarraldo, a British publisher, takes simple cover designs to the extreme. Their covers are all solid colors, blue for fiction & white for nonfiction, and besides basic information like author & title you'll find little else on the book (except, of course, for some blurbs).
So whether you don't like the cover of your favorite new release or you're looking for a fifth copy of your favorite Jane Austen novel, the moral of the story is to never settle. What you're looking for is out there waiting to be found, you might just have to start looking a little further afield.
