Book Covers: Incongruous Images

Ever been shocked by a book cover? Me, too. Most recently by the cover of the new paperback edition of Philipp Meyer’s American Rust, released earlier this month. My husband alerted me to it after he saw it, sending me an e-mail saying he was he was “shocked at the cover, a young girl and boy walking through what looks like a ghost town on the western plains.” After looking at the new cover on the Random House website, I’m scratching my head too.

We both read the book last year, which I wrote about here. It was the image on the original hardback cover that drew our attention to it when browsing in a bookstore one afternoon. The simple image of a rusty railroad spike against a stark white background made it stand out from the other titles on display around it. That cover lured me to reach for the book, take it from the shelf and read the jacket copy, flip through the pages and read a few sentences. Sold.

If the new paperback image had been on display that day last year in the bookstore, I’d have walked past without giving it a second glance. Marketing is no doubt trying for an even wider audience now – possibly trying to lure romance readers. I suppose a book with a young couple walking side by side through golden fields on the cover has been shown to sell more copies in a certain demographic. Except that the image is misleading. It is not the landscape of the book, nor is the story a love story (although there is a subplot about a romantic liaison). American Rust is a book about an industrial region in decline, the towns along the Monongahela River just south of Pittsburgh in particular. While Buell is a fictional town, it is rooted in a very real place known as the Mon Valley – and it sure doesn’t look like what’s on that new paperback cover.

Other book covers which were even more inappropriate have been written about recently by Tayari Jones at her blog and Kate Harding at Salon after the publishing house Bloomsbury USA used images of white women on books about characters who were African American. Because this has happened twice over the past year at Bloomsbury, it appears they believe a book with a dark skinned heroine on the cover would not sell as well – even if the book is about African American characters.

Authors are often unhappy with the covers that adorn their books. Even if their contract gives them input into the design, as Christina Baker Kline wrote about in a post “Anatomy of a Book Cover: Bird in Hand” at her blog about the progression of cover designs for her latest novel, it is usually the publisher who has the final decision.

The image that comes to mind when I think about American Rust will always be that rusty railroad spike on the original cover and the industrial decay of the mill towns of southwestern Pennsylvania as depicted in the book. The essence of that story (at least for me) will always be the friendship between two young men, and their plan to leave a place where they have no future and how that plan goes awry. It’s about a place where the American dream has corroded, but where people still try to hang on and do what they can to survive because it’s their home. It shows what happens to hardworking people when factories close and jobs disappear. American Rust is a gritty and dark novel, a story which deserves a more fitting image on the cover.

The Picture that Inspired 80,000 Words: Christina Baker Kline's BIRD IN HAND

[It’s my pleasure to host a guest post this week by novelist Christina Baker Kline]

The newspaper clipping is in tatters. Folded, yellowed, curling at the edges and mended in places with clear tape, it was tacked to the bulletin board in my office for eight years – except for the times I brought it with me to writers’ colonies or on family vacations (under the delusion that I might actually get work done on a beach).

More than a decade ago, leafing through The New York Times, I came across this image as I was beginning to work on a new novel. I assume that it was part of an advertisement, but I cut it out carefully around the edges, so I don’t know for sure. I don’t even know when it appeared in the paper, though from what I’ve deduced from articles on the back side it seems to have been some time in the spring of 1998. (An ad for a wine store says “Prices effective through April 30, 1998. © 1998.”)

The image floored me. I had begun writing about a young couple, Ben and Claire, both expatriates living in England, who befriend another American named Charlie … who falls in love with Claire. Who may or may not be falling in love with him. This picture in the newspaper, it seemed to me, perfectly encapsulated the complexity of my characters’ situation.

For many reasons, the story this photo tells is intriguing. A couple on a park bench sits close together, facing away from the viewer. The man has his arm around the woman’s back, his hand resting protectively on her shoulder. The woman’s arm is around his shoulder, as well … except that it isn’t. It extends along and behind the bench, and her open palm rests on the hand of a man on the other side, who kisses it tenderly. (A two-sided park bench? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in real life.)

All the markers of romantic Paris – the French restaurant awning, the folded newspaper (Le Monde), the European car in the background and baroquely detailed (if blurry) streetlight in the foreground, a smattering of fat pigeons, even the man’s black turtleneck and the woman’s plaid skirt and sensible heels – contribute to the illicit thrill of this image.

Does the man on the other side of the bench have any idea that his girlfriend/wife is being unfaithful? Did she and the man kissing her hand plan to meet at this place, or was it happenstance? For that matter, do they know each other, or is this a spontaneous moment of anonymous passion? Did the photographer happen on this scene, or was he, perhaps, hired by the man with his back to us on the bench?

The image is shocking in its seeming casualness, in the brazen, in-broad-daylight transgression taking place before our eyes. I was fascinated by the contradictions: the woman so clearly part of a couple, yet making herself available to the man behind her, her demure pose contrasting with her open, searching palm. The man’s body language, too, is contradictory; he sits casually reading the paper, one leg crossed over the other, but his eyes are closed in passion as he kisses the woman’s palm.

Instinctively I knew that this image would help me access the core motivations of my characters, who act in comparably indiscreet and scandalous ways. Claire loves her husband, but she feels something entirely different for Charlie – a passion she’s never felt. Charlie respects Ben, but is blinded by his love for Claire. And when Claire’s best friend from childhood, Alison, comes to visit and ends up engaged to Charlie, things spin even further out of control.

This novel, now in bookstores, is called Bird in Hand. When I sent the final manuscript to my publisher about six months ago I took the tattered newspaper clipping down and put it in a cardboard box, along with my handwritten first draft of the novel. Now my bulletin board is covered with postcards from the New York tenement museum depicting the interior of an immigrant Irish family's cramped apartment, a black and white photograph of a young couple at Coney Island in the 1920s, a map of the village of Kinvara, Ireland, and other inspiration for my new novel-in-progress.


Christina Baker Kline is the author of four novels, including, most recently, Bird in Hand and The Way Life Should Be. She is Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University and lives outside of New York City. Her website is www.christinabakerkline.com and her blog, A Writing Year: Conversations about the Creative Process, is http://christinabakerkline.wordpress.com.