Doubleday recently posted the cover art for the new J. California Cooper novel, Life Is Short But Wide, and it seems the design team pulled up the same photo from the Getty Images archives that HarperCollins used three years ago for Jeffrey Ford‘s Edgar-winning The Girl in the Glass. If you look closely, you can spot the three main differences: When Georgia Liebman designed the cover to The Girl in the Glass back in ’05, she added, well, a girl in the glass, along with a blue butterfly—and, as far as my untrained eye can see, those two pairs of shoes in the Doubleday cover appear to have been put in by that illustration’s designer. (But I could be wrong—UPDATE: And no less an authority than Jeffrey Ford writes in to correct me: “I believe the boots were actually original to the photo, because Harper Collins originally showed it to me with the boots, and I asked them to remove them as there are no boots in the story.”)
The original photograph was taken by the late Debra McClinton, who committed suicide last year by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. This weekend, San Francisco’s Gallery 291 showed a memorial exhibition.