The phrase "never judge a book by it's cover" should only apply to people, because I'm sure you're meant to judge books by their cover. Think about it, publishing companies have a whole marketing department and graphic artists that spend a lot of time and resources to come up with great covers for their books. It is, after all, the first thing you see with books. The colours, pictures, font, they're all there to draw you in, make you pick up the book, make you read it, get drawn in, and ultimately spend your money on it.
I believe, like with all art, book covers should be modern, stick to the times. And I think that's what they did with the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever books by Stephen R. Donaldson. It's one of my all time favourite series and I'm half way through the final book at the moment. Through the years, I've seen many covers for the first trilogy. I found most (if not all) of them online, shown below. I only included covers of the first book, Lord Foul's Bane, for comparison.
The blue one in the middle is the copy I own, and is also my favourite. The covers aren't in particular order, but you can see how much it's changed since the book was first published in 1977 (first edition cover is second row on the left).
When the first trilogy was published with new, modern cover art back in 2004, I was excited. It was probably done to coincide with the final tetralogy that came out in the same year.
The colours are nice. They're clean and sleek. But compared to the previous covers, it's definitely minimal. I believe that fantasy books should have more to the cover though, like characters, setting, magical creatures, castles, what have you, just to help with imagining the world. The fantasy genre as a whole is so surreal that I think readers need a little help. That's why fantasy books tend to have a map, right? So yes, these new covers are quite bland.
I also believe that book covers should suit the content of the story. With themes like leprosy, war, violation, power, dilemmas and destruction, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is most definitely not for children. To appeal to the adult readers, I think you would want to avoid the pretty pictures of horses.
But I hate these covers. They annoy me to no end. Someone at the publishing company Del Ray really dropped the ball on this. I cannot believe that these covers were made, approved, then printed. If you've read the series, or know anything about it, you would know that the ring should be white gold. The covers of this edition is so generic, like the artist got a brief that said "make a minimal cover with a ring on it" and that's it. Hmmm, a ring of power, oh I know, Lord of the Rings. There is no one person to blame for this. Books go through many hands, like editing, proofreading, marketing, more editing... But not one person said "Hey, shouldn't this ring be white?" When such a fundamental and crucial mistake is made like this, and it gets published, it makes me wonder how good Del Ray is as a company.
Although maybe they did realise but thought maybe no one would notice.
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