Aug 03 2007
The Great Cover Debate
Originally appeared May 24, 2007
Say what you will about the heaving mantitty clinch covers. I’ll start. They’re embarrassing, laughable, and do nothing to increase the respectability of the romance genre.
But.
I was reading Johanna Lindsey books with their dawn-of-Fabio covers when my contemporaries were still reading Laura Ingalls Wilder. When I left home, I needed my own copies (because my mother is selfish and wouldn’t share with her baby). At that point, the trend in cover art was toward abstract and flowery, so that’s what’s on my shelf now.
(The exception being Tender Rebel, for which I guilted mum into taking the pristine new copy with its flower power and squirreled away the clinch copy with its cracked binding and yellowed pages for myself. Can you blame me? It’s pre-Fabio. The hero’s shirtless shoulder is nicely muscled but not overly so and unobscured by the overlong greasy locks that would take over a couple of years later. The sight of it still makes my heart go pitty-pat.)
I thought the flower movement was a good thing, as I was always repulsed by Fabio and could happily live without seeing him every time I reached for a romance novel.
A funny thing happened that kinda sorta changed my mind about the heaving mantitty clinch covers, though. As I was entering my abstract flowery J. Li’s into LibraryThing, I thought, “Romance titles are nonsensical. Gentle Rogue indeed. Gag. I have no idea what’s actually in this book.” Then I clicked the link to change the cover art.
Pow! “Oh, that’s James and Georgie’s story.” She’s posing as a cabin boy. He’s not fooled. She doesn’t know he knows and believes he believes he’s putting the moves on a boy. Hilarity ensues.
Instant. Product. Recognition.
Guess what I put in my TBR to be enjoyed again.
We remember beefcake-poofy dress covers. They might make us cringe, but we remember them. They’re colorful. They try to titillate by showing empirically attractive people consumed with lust in various stages of getting it on. They engage the interest in a way flowers or a lone shirtless man or a grayscale headshot or a cutesie cartoon or some anonymous piece of scenery never can.
Chances are, if you remember a cover with Fabio wearing neon green eyeshadow, you can remember something inside the book, too. Perhaps only that there was no mention of the hero having transvestite tendencies, but that’s something.
I don’t want to be seen in public with a heaving mantitty clinch cover any more than you do, but I now have to admit they serve their purpose. There’s no mistaking that style of art as belonging to any other genre. When you grab a hunk of heaving mantitty, you know exactly what you’re getting.
The current reprint of Tender Rebel, by the way, has a castle on the front. There is no frickin’ castle anywhere in that book. It is not a visual that evokes a feeling of romance for me and is never going to trigger a fond memory of the story within those pages.
So I’ll be hanging onto my battered 20-year-old copy, thanks very much.
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