That's not my cover at all!

[Simon]

This is the last one on covers, I promise, but there is one further issue that occasionally rears its head, where you find the right book, love it to bits, but cannot find an edition with a cover to match.

This has happened to me. The book is wonderful, but you wish that the cover was something other than it is. What would you choose?

Here is an example. I like the works of Thomas Ligotti, having not long discovered him, and there have been numerous editions of his tales with a variety of covers, some of which I have thought pretty good. But none of the covers I have seen match what I see in my head when I read him. Given the disturbing nature of his work, I wondered who I would choose to best represent him, and came up with the Polish surrealist Zdzisław Beksiński, who is pretty disturbing in his own right.

If you go looking for fantasy wallpapers on the web, there are some amazing works out there, works that exist only in solitude. Do you look at them sometimes and think, 'that would fit so well with so and so'? Or do you have established artists in your head, works by Caravaggio or Goya for example, that better fit the word on the page?

[M.L.]

As you've described, hmm, can't say that I do exactly, but if I saw Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy" on a cover, I'd probably buy the book. Maybe the same with something by Anselm Kiefer. Or, the other way, if The Garden of Earthly Delights was on a cover, I probably would not buy it! So certain works of art would attract my attention but so far not to a specific book. Caravaggio probably not. Franz Marc, probably yes, and so on! :)

[Simon]

M.L. wrote: "As you've described, hmm, can't say that I do exactly, but if I saw Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy" on a cover, I'd probably buy the book."

That's close enough. It's one of those games I play when I have a book I particularly like, but I imagine few other people do it.

And here is another thing. When the writer of the book is also an artist, and they choose to represent their own work, the thought 'I know of another artist that would do such a better job' does not even occur to me. Examples would be J.R.R. Tolkien for The Hobbit, Tove Jansson for the 'Moomin' books and Mervyn Peake for the 'Gormenghast' trilogy.

But taking a work like The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, I have seen nothing that equals the sheer imaginative power and scope of the story. Something like John Martin's 'The Great Day of His Wrath' would be more appropriate. (As you might gather, I rather like our William).

And I think 'The Garden of Unearthly Delights' has been greatly overused.