# Rubbish book covers



## ChrisWard (Mar 10, 2012)

Not sure if anyone's seen this before. I was just browsing some blogs and I came across this little gem of a site which posts a rubbish book cover from some long forgotten masterpiece every day. Some of these are so bad they're almost good...

http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/


----------



## A.A (Mar 30, 2012)

*snicker*
The Make Way for Dragons cover is hilarious - esp. considering it depicts things not actually in the book.


----------



## purplesmurf (Mar 20, 2012)

I take those as proof that you don't need an amazing cover to sell a book. . .


----------



## deckard (Jan 13, 2011)

Anya said:


> *snicker*
> The Make Way for Dragons cover is hilarious - esp. considering it depicts things not actually in the book.


Are you saying you actually read this?


----------



## ChrisWard (Mar 10, 2012)

In the caption the blog owner says that. 

I imagine a lot of them are good. There's quite a few big name authors in there if you browse. Those covers though ... some are so bad they're good!


----------



## Sean Patrick Fox (Dec 3, 2011)

Certainly worth a look for laughs, but most of these are pretty standard for the time they were made. I see a lot of worse covers on Amazon every day that are actually horrible, not just outdated.


----------



## QuantumIguana (Dec 29, 2010)

The cover for In the Den of the Dragon was the worst. It looked like it was drawn by a child.


----------



## Brad Murgen (Oct 17, 2011)

That just shows why people used to not take Fantasy and Sci-Fi seriously...


----------



## balaspa (Dec 27, 2009)

That's funny, but also kind of endearing in its own way.  Then again, I also love watching really awful movies, sometimes, just for the entertainment of it all.


----------



## Tony Richards (Jul 6, 2011)

Poor, poor Mike Resnick -- he's a good writer. And I actually _own_ that edition of John Crowley's _Beasts_ ... it's an excellent novel, in spite of the cover.


----------



## dalya (Jul 26, 2011)

These covers really take me back in time!

Many of them aren't "bad" exactly, but are examples of typical 80s book covers.

I wonder if 30 years from now there'll be sites with examples of typical self-pubbed (or trad-pubbed) 2012-ish era books...


----------



## Indy (Jun 7, 2010)

Thank you for an entire evening's entertainment.  The terrified, cross dressing alligator man caused quite a ruckus around here.


----------



## JFHilborne (Jan 22, 2011)

Those are funny, and a definite flashback. Wonder how todays covers will be viewed 25 years from now.


----------



## Geoffrey (Jun 20, 2009)

I love a lot of the stupid old book and magazine covers from back in the day .... I especially have a fondness for the homoerotic and the misogynistic ones .... good stuff and they make me laugh.


----------



## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Yeah. . .that popular sports cover. . . .I wonder if it came across the same way when first published?


----------



## Geoffrey (Jun 20, 2009)

I'm going through the books on that site and I have to admit I owned more than one of those covers at one point or another .....


----------



## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

I looked through a bunch of them. . .semi-randomly. . .I don't really see anything _wrong_ with most of them. . .and I'd not say they're rubbish. . .but definitely dated!

I did see one that I'd have sworn was from the 60's though, but it said published in 2008. . . . .I guess they were going for the retro look.


----------



## Carol (was Dara) (Feb 19, 2011)

I think I have some of those Star Wars covers on my bookshelf.


----------



## Vukovina (Mar 30, 2012)

Those are amazing. I don't see any rubbish.

I'll take the good artwork over today's onslaught of stock photography, thank ya very much.


----------



## Dawn McCullough White (Feb 24, 2010)

Thanks for the laughs!!

Dawn


----------



## Scarlett_R (Sep 30, 2011)

I love these covers. I know they're bad but if there was a series of book that _still_ has that design on it I'd definitely consider it. That would stand out on the shelves against its genre competitors.

On the other side I love this site: http://www.bookcoverarchive.com which always inspires me to design bigger and better.


----------



## Rogerelwell (May 19, 2011)

I definitely have some of those SW covers on my bookshelf.

I agree they are dated, not necessarily rubbish.  Seen in the context of the times when they were published, they probably looked quite...futuristic.  Maybe not all of them, but quite a few would have...


----------



## jenjiyana42 (Mar 15, 2012)

You can see a bunch more of them here, on ICHC's sci-fi section. I don't know who posts what first, so some of them are the same, but they're hilarious anyway.

http://scifi.icanhascheezburger.com/tag/book-covers/


----------



## Kimberly Llewellyn (Aug 18, 2011)

Those were some wild covers! Wow!


----------



## xandy3 (Jun 13, 2010)

I love that blog! LOL! I've been a fan of it for a few years now, and "like" it on FB.

Not only is it good for a few laughs, it's a demonstration of _what not to do._


----------



## JBool56 (Feb 22, 2012)

Wee, I'm not going to say you can't judge a book by its cover... Oops, I just did.... But what about those old covers with no graphics at all? Would anyone dare to do that today? Though come to think of it, what use is a cover for a kindle book really?


----------



## Sara Pierce (May 15, 2011)

Lol! I remember some of these types of covers from trolling old bookstores but some are seriously . But they must have sold something right?


----------



## Steverino (Jan 5, 2011)

Fantaaaaastic!


----------



## George Berger (Aug 7, 2011)

JBool56 said:


> But what about those old covers with no graphics at all? Would anyone dare to do that today?


I've seen quite a few titles lately with extraordinarily low-key covers. The one that jumps immediately to mind is Neal Stephenson's _Reamde_. Almost all of the best-of-the-year anthologies for short fiction / travel writing / food writing have had text-only covers in recent years. Little, Brown's Kindle edition of Roads to Quoz by William Least Heat-Moon is text-only, for some reason. There are undoubtedly others that I can't think of this late at night.

I've also seen at least a few cover designers who seem to specialize in typography-only designs, and to judge from their prices, there seems to be some demand, at least...


----------



## Richardcrasta (Jul 29, 2010)

I was speaking to a Dutch person. He said that most American book covers wouldn't work in Holland. He also thought that the idea of judging a book by its cover was a pretty shallow one. 

And yes, most Penguins and a few other great writers in the Forties, fifties had plain covers: title and author's name, with perhaps a black border.


----------



## Grace Elliot (Mar 14, 2011)

Is it just me that can 'feel' the book by looking at those covers. The paperbacks were quite stiff and often had yellow dye rounds the edges...I feel quite nostalgic looking at them. That said, sci-fi can hold it's head high compared to some of the old romance covers...


----------



## LCLarson (Jan 3, 2012)

I had to read both pages as I needed to see if someone wrote, 'You can't judge a book by its cover' - lol - thank goodness someone did or I'd have been pulling out my hair wondering why it wasn't here!

Maybe I'm used to the no-frills covers on the classics so I'm less concerned about them than I am by what the author has written about his/her own book on the book's Amazon page (spelling mistakes and errors there turn me off, immediately, regardless of the cover) and I always have a quick 'look inside' to check spelling, syntax, grammar, etc. as I'm a bit of a spelling Nazi and even though spell-check has helped most with their difficult words, the confusions between 'their, there, they're', 'it's, its', 'here, hear' as well as correctly spelled words in the wrong context (so spell check didn't highlight the word 'vagina' as it was spelled correctly, but the author was writing about a man with a heart condition and meant to have the word 'angina').

I really do like looking and 'nice covers' though - ones that give you an idea of what the book is about (fire breathing dragon on the cover... fair chance it's not a Mills and Boon type romance).


----------



## George Berger (Aug 7, 2011)

Grace Elliot said:


> That said, sci-fi can hold it's head high compared to some of the old romance covers...


Or mysteries and thrillers from the late '40s/early '50s. Shady-looking man on the cover, using a stethoscope to listen to a safe by the light of a candle? Probably a locked-room murder mystery, as often as not. Swooning, hysterical-looking woman in a nightdress, being supported by two handsome police officers? Only a fifty percent chance there's even a woman, or a police officer, in the story, let alone a nightdress.



LCLarson said:


> ...correctly spelled words in the wrong context (so spell check didn't highlight the word 'vagina' as it was spelled correctly, but the author was writing about a man with a heart condition and meant to have the word 'angina').


In my senior year of high school, many, many, many moons ago, one assignment was to compose a two-minute speech and present it to the class. This shy little adorable girl, one of the sweetest and most innocent-looking people in the whole school, gave a speech about the threat of extinction as it applied to living organisms...

...only she left out the "ni" in "organism" _every single time_. I'm still amazed that nobody laughed at her...



> fire breathing dragon on the cover... fair chance it's not a Mills and Boon type romance.


Even dragons need love.


----------



## Eric Zawadzki (Feb 4, 2011)

Thanks for linking that. I'm crying with laughter, and my wife is looking at me funny.

"Nothing says Agent of Chaos better than Ming The Merciless, dressed in a naked man print gown playing with marbles."

Priceless.


----------

