12 thoughts on “Judging A Book By Its Cover”

  1. It remains to be seen if this will drive kids to study the contemporaneous history of those works so that they can actually understand them. Otherwise, they might as well be reading glittering vampires.

  2. I don’t see any problem with it. I certainly isn’t false advertising. I thinks old school SiFi should return to the practice. Stranger in a Strange Land could be the gateway drug.

    1. Maybe someone will file a faulty product labeling lawsuit. “My clients claim that the cover art of James Joyce’s Ulysses fraudulently portrays the novel as a work of literature that is both interesting and at least somewhat readable.”

      Another court will require Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf to carry a label warning that the book has nothing to do with a 1960’s rock band.

  3. Romeo and Juliet is a novel???

    Looks like someone needs to design a cover that will get ABC News to open the book.

    1. How about this for the book cover – the front page of a (highly anachronistic) Veronese newspaper, with a giant Hearst-worthy sensationalist headline about the double suicide and a big photo of the star-crossed idiots. And smaller headlines like “Prince Escalus to impose new regulations on apothecaries” and “Couple top contenders for this year’s Darwin Award.”

  4. The publishing industry has done this before. Years ago a magazine with wonderful, in-depth articles was struggling to attract readers, and the founder said “Hey, let’s put a naked girl on the cover. Heck, let’s add pages of naked girls and a big fold-out picture in each issue.” Heff has been rolling in money ever since.

  5. I thought the 1996 film version of Romeo & Juliet was inspired. After all, modern audiences have no experience with swords and daggers at all – or with horses for that matter.

    1. Only the super-duper hyper rich millionaires and billionaires have experience with horses. You know, that dressage thing?

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