A Tale of Three Dust Jackets

Here at UnBeige, we love a good dust jacket almost as much as we love a good book (which we store in teetering stacks on any flat surface we can find), and so we were intrigued to read Ron Hogan's recent post on Galleycat, our bookish brother blog, concerning the dust jacket switcheroo for Mathilda Savitch (FSG). The debut novel by Victor Lodato started life as an advance reading copy (ARC) wrapped in an illustration with a macabre Alice in Wonderland quality. We also found a slightly tweaked American ARC (pictured above, at center) that tightened up the typeface selection and toned down the Alice factor, ditching the girl's headband and sash, trimming her hair, and ensuring that she was outfitted in more sensible shoes for a scramble through the forest, which has also been tidied of a craggy tree. "Both my editor, Courtney Hodell, and I thought this was a great cover," Lovato told Hogan, "but maybe it just needed to be...sexier in some ways. It was a little cold. So they wanted to play with some other ideas." The new dust jacket cover (above, at right) of the novel, which hit bookstore shelves nationwide last month, features what you'll probably recognize as the work of artists and snowglobe wizards Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz. Specifically, it's "Traveler 48 at Night," a photo of a snowglobe they created in 2003. "The novel's about a child alone in an emotionally frozen landscape, and she's trying to figure out lots of things, from where her sister went to death in general," said Lodato, pointing to the final cover. "And this just seemed very resonant to that."

Fishbowl

A Tale of Three Dust Jackets

Stephanie Murg

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Stephanie Murg