Sign in with Facebook
I read a lot of historical novels, and it drives me BANANAS when the dress on the cover is from the wrong era. I hope to raise awareness of this distressing problem. But this is all just in fun and in no way reflects the voters' opinions of the writing. We know that authors rarely have a lot of input when a cover is designed. VOTERS: It's a huge help if you can tell us a) the era in which the book is set, b) why the dress is wrong.
Jane
3236 books
1461 friends
1461 friends
Misfit
5492 books
530 friends
530 friends
Iset
1189 books
234 friends
234 friends
Susanna - Censored by GoodReads
3386 books
852 friends
852 friends
Bettie
15673 books
19 friends
19 friends
Christy B
1218 books
200 friends
200 friends
Rebecca
6483 books
300 friends
300 friends
the_cat
3143 books
30 friends
30 friends
More voters…
Comments Showing 1-50 of 305 (305 new)
Urgh, you can add The Boleyn Wife, Misfit. That neckline is all kinds of wrong for that period, and as for sleeves attached to the dress, why, whoever heard of such a thing?! :pNot sure about Queen's Pawn. Looks pseudo-Medieval to me but I'm not confident enough to give a green light. Incidentally her Eleanor novel had the same kind of fur neckline too and that also might be up for grabs.
Hm right now I can't think of a cover but maybe later I remember something...
There's one I've read that's set in the 18th century, and they slapped a regency shift dress on the heroine - naturally, I can't remember the title.
Thanks Isis, I wasn't sure.BTW, I hope everyone realizes we do know authors don't have much control over their covers and this is all in good fun.
I can see why Dressmaker is currently #1 - a bustle on the Titanic???
I'd say "most definitely yes" on that Boleyn Wife cover, Misfit.
Susanna wrote: "I'd say "most definitely yes" on that Boleyn Wife cover, Misfit."Thanks, it is up there. BTW, what era dress is the model wearing on The Second Empress?
Misfit wrote: "Thanks Isis, I wasn't sure.BTW, I hope everyone realizes we do know authors don't have much control over their covers and this is all in good fun."
*nods* It's a rare author that has that kind of input. And also, this is not criticism of the writing quality within the books.
That thing she's wearing doesn't look like any dress from 1809 that I can think of. Neckline just ... wrong. I can't tell where the waist is supposed to be, or even if there is one.
What I wait for, with baited breath, is a novel set in the 1830s, with accurate clothes on the cover. Never seen that one.
For just about any date in the 20s, I don't buy that dress - shirtwaist with box pleats. Hemline too high for early in decade. Waist in natural position, not dropped. Dubious about shoes.I could buy it as a suggestion of the 30s.
Susanna wrote: "For just about any date in the 20s, I don't buy that dress - shirtwaist with box pleats. Hemline too high for early in decade. Waist in natural position, not dropped. Dubious about shoes.I cou..."
The shoes make it a later date don't you think?
Also - isn't this cover picture on the duplicate cover list too?
You know? I was thinking about that cover from Emma Campion's The King Mistress where she looks like she is dragging around the tablecloth 
but then I've noticed that her other cover for the same book isn't better 
We are talking 14th century clothing: 
... maybe the tablecloth wasn't that far after all... :D
Susanna wrote: "That thing she's wearing doesn't look like any dress from 1809 that I can think of. Neckline just ... wrong. I can't tell where the waist is supposed to be, or even if there is one."I had noticed the same "just-wrongness" about The Second Empress too. Looks like a modern dress somehow - something I see quite often.
Misfit:BTW, I hope everyone realizes we do know authors don't have much control over their covers and this is all in good fun.Isis: It's a rare author that has that kind of input. And also, this is not criticism of the writing quality within the books.
I am about to amend the description so that I can make it clear this is just fun. To produce historically accurate costumes for a cover shoot is actually pretty hard, as I have found while working on the cover of my book. BUT I do feel that cover designers (or self-pubbed authors if DIY-ing) should spend just a leeetle time researching the overall look of the era of the book before slapping any old dress onto the cover. Big 6 publishers, especially. Their claim to be the experts in book publishing makes far less impact when the cover's just WRONG WRONG WRONG.
Thanks for amending that Jane. Hopefully we won't have any flame throwing at Twitter over this :)
Oh I'd really hate for that to happen. Of course if they do, they can criticize MY book cover when it comes out. It took about 100 emails to come to an agreement with my photographer (who's a friend) about a dress that looked right and didn't bust the budget. But I'm sure that if you're going to be really nitpicking, there are brickbats to be thrown.The hair, for instance. It's extremely hard to replicate hairstyles from other eras (a major cause of no-forehead syndrome I suspect), so we went with a loose pretty look that is far too modern. I studied other histfic covers and noted that this is the conventional solution (e.g. the Philippa Gregory book above) and pretty much what readers will expect.
I was interested to note that the producers of The Tudors modernized costumes and hair for much the same reason. Being 100% authentic risks alienating the viewer/reader, so there is a gray area where being wrong actually looks right.
On the other hand there are those of us who are always going to notice. ALWAYS.
I saw something in my feeds today that appears an author over reacted a bit to the way one reviewer shelved her book. Do they have nothing better to do?Covers are tough, probably more so when having to deal with a mainstream publisher. Headless women in pretty dresses sell, so that's what we see. Not all authors have enough clout to argue what's inappropriate to the subject.
Now there's all that photoshopping going around, leading to a high incident count of deja vu book covers which we readers are happy to spot and point out :p
Yup - my photographer friend has had the same spooky house used on quite a few covers.I think authors and publishers should view reader reactions as helpful rather than hostile. Do people selling, say, soda get upset because some people can't stand the taste of their drink? No, they measure. They might see that 80% of people love their drink, and simply disregard the other 20% as "not our customer." Or they may take notice of what the other 20% say--for example, that the lemon taste is too strong--and work on a more pleasing alternative version. They don't give up making drinks or whine on Twitter that people should really love their drinks but they're idiots, or attack the 20% with accusations of trying to ruin their lives.
Books are a matter of taste--if a million people find your book to their taste, you've got a winner. If not, write a better book.
Jane wrote: "Yup - my photographer friend has had the same spooky house used on quite a few covers.I think authors and publishers should view reader reactions as helpful rather than hostile. Do people selling..."
Yes! I will never understand the freaking out that happens when people don't like your book. I don't like ABC restaurant and tell my friends so. I don't like the vac I purchased at Amazon because it was too loud and woke the baby. I don't see the chef/restaurant owner/vac manufacturer freaking out, nor does a critical amazon review always stop me from considering a product. Just because one person downgrades the vac because it was loud and woke the baby, is not necessarily a consideration for someone with no baby.
Drat. I tried to include
,but unlike the nice "add book/author" feature in these comments which allows you to check another edition, the voting feature above only allows one edition to show, and you can't change it. So it would only give me one (wrong) cover, no matter how many different ways I searched for this book.
Darned inconvenient if you want a specific cover for a list.
This, by the way, is the Celtic British queen Boadicea, in her fightin' Julius Caesar garb.
There's also a recent edition of "Pride and Prejudice" I can't find on GR, with a ridiculous painted pulpy romancey sort of cover. And then there's this:
The dresses aren't too bad, but the makeup, and especially the ridiculous wigs, put it over the top.
I haven't seen books set in the 1830s with proper fashions on the cover, but I have seen plenty of Jane Austen with 1830s fashions on the cover. And giant hoop skirts. And Pre-Raphaelite droopy aesthetic girls from the 1880s.
And whatever this is:
Alessandra wrote: "Drat. I tried to include,but unlike the nice "add book/author" feature in these comments which allows you to check another edition, the voting feature above on..."
tap in the isbn # into the 'search for book' tab - it is not fail proof but you stand a better chance of getting what you are looking for.
Bettie wrote: "tap in the isbn # into the 'search for book' tab - it is not fail proof but you stand a better chance of getting what you are looking for. "D'oh, of course -- isbn numbers!
Thank you, Bettie. I've just added the remarkably weird "Pride and Prejudice" that's the last thing in the previous post, and I'm off to see if I can get "The Pagan Queen."
EDIT: Drat, no isbn. Oh, well.
What works for me is: Go to that specific edition and add it to your wishlist or any list. Then you can select it here from your books. Later you can delete it from your shelves, no problem.
the_cat wrote: "What works for me is: Go to that specific edition and add it to your wishlist or any list. Then you can select it here from your books. Later you can delete it from your shelves, no problem."hey, that's a nifty tip, thanks
Cool, thanks, cat.BTW, I'd like to reiterate about that edition of
Pride and Prejudice. As near as I can tell, that outfit is some sort of 1990's New Wave thing, haute couture with a very, very, very vaguely historique look to it. I mean, seriously.I've been studying historic dress for a very long time, and I had long since been resigned to cheeseball anachronistic covers. This is kind of a fun list.
Given that this Pride & Prejudice came out in 2010, my first guess was that it's attempting to appeal to women who like vampire books. And then I looked closer. This nook edition is by a "publisher" called Superior Formatting Publishing, which from its website (which is nothing more than the most basic of blogs) is just one of those one-person outfits that repackages free-domain stuff to make a quick buck. The website and lack of availability of the book suggests that they have sunk without trace. I suspect the image was naively swiped from some style website and that the "publisher" got into trouble for this sort of thing.
I've no objection to repackaging if well and honestly done (the whole book, attention paid to formatting, etc. etc.) - after all, publishers have been doing this forever (I was buying £1 Classic Editions 30 years ago). But per-leez, at least take the time to find a public-domain image (there are plenty on Wikipedia) that suits the topic, or just do a simple thumbnail design (even then you get into font copyright issues).
The trouble is, it's so easy to get the text of classic works (from the Gutenberg Project, for example) and then just slap it into e-book format, throw on a random image and charge 99cents, that we're going to see a LOT of this until some rules are developed to stomp on the worst abuses.
*steps off soapbox* has anybody ever seen a really GOOD Austen cover? I'm not sure if I have, but that could be because all my JA books are from the 1970s and talk about cheesy...the 70s did cheesy wholesale.
Hmm. Most of my Jane Austen is the Everyman's Library from Knopf, and I think they all use that painting people were trying to claim was a childhood portrait of Austen -- the one showing a roughly eight-year-old girl in the fashions of 1810 when Austen was born in 1775.But I've also got some Random House Modern Library editions, and they're not bad:
(although the repro on GR of that S&S cover is pretty terrible -- looks way low res)
Should I remove the Pride & Prejudice cover from the list, since it's an obscure, possibly shady edition?
Oh, and I would date the cover of The Paris Wife at around 1952-1955.
That second cover is my kind of classic book cover...attractive and eternal.Might be a good idea to remove P&P. That edition no longer seems to be available on the nook.
Agree about The Paris Wife, and will vote it up - Random House have absolutely NO EXCUSE for getting it wrong. I am prepared to be more forgiving to self-pubbers, who have limited resources, but the primary argument that the Big 6 give for holding on to their prestige in the publishing world is that they are the experts, upholding the quality of literature. So I'd like to see some expertise, how about it?
I really need to see The Paris Wife close up. I could swear there's a floating sandwich in the middle of the picture, controlled by a finger that does not seem to belong to the woman's hand.
I uploaded a new cover to the Random House Sense and Sensibility -- it's a really lovely portrait miniature of two sisters from just the right time period. Hopefully it will propagate out, although at the moment the bookcover link is still the old Lego-brick lo-res one.I see someone else voted on that Pride and Prejudice cover, so I can't make it go away any more.
As for The Paris Wife, I do dislike when they seem to think any old "oldish" clothing will do.
Well I can see that the sandwich is in fact a chair, but WHAT's with that finger? Why is it swollen and what is she pointing at?
I removed it, Alessandra - the Pride and Prejudice cover with the weird ruffle.
To all voters - if you could tell me a) the era of the book and b) the era of the dress in the box under your vote, that would be a huge help to all. I'd like this list to have some educational value and I'm pretty good on costume but don't know the intricacies of anything except the 19th century.
Uh Jane: I see the lil window to write that nfo but I can't see how to post it...
I know, kitty, talk about confusing. You type into the little window and wait a few seconds, and your words are somehow magically absorbed into Goodreads and saved forever.There are many techie things I'd like to change on GR, and this is one of them.
That's good to know. I got the willies not seeing any "save" button.I hope my comments are comprehensible.
oooh magic...Not very practical though since you have to click on every person to see the comments...
True. It would be nice to be able to see all the comments together.Then again, maybe we can put things on this thread, in an expanded form.
For example:
Wolf By the Ears, by Ann Rinaldi, is about Harriet Hemings, daughter of Thomas Jefferson by his slave (and half-sister of his deceased wife) Sally Hemings. She was born in 1801 and Jefferson died in 1826, so the story is probably around 1820 (I haven't read it).The dress is certainly not the fashion of 1820, or even 1800. It's closer to 1775, but it's not very like it. There is an attempt at the correct outline, but it has the wrong neckline (high scooped instead of low square), wrong torso (hourglassy with lifted and separated big round breasts instead of a flattened cone), wrong underskirt (pleated bright purple instead of smooth -- well, something else, anyway), and wrong overskirt (limp, short, aprony, instead of held out by something and as long as the underskirt). And, as usual, no headgear, which would have looked bizarre to people at the time.
This is what a young woman, a light-skinned slave treated well and indulgently, might wear around 1820:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_XNxQTR5Jcdg...
the_cat wrote: "oooh magic...Not very practical though since you have to click on every person to see the comments..."
No, if you click on the voters on each item it shows all the comments.
Oh, darn my phone's touchscreen. My vote and reason for "Mary Bloody Mary" just vanished.
Very original and fascinating listopia.
I've added a couple of new ones. I hope it was OK to add a couple of male inspired *dress*.
and