Covers can be amazing things. They can encapsulate a work in ways that even the material they are wrapped around cannot crystalize in such succinct purity. I could repurpose Warholas or the covers of Chalet School novels around the pages of anything I write for the rest of my life and probably be pretty satisfied. There are covers, however, that fail to represent the material they are meant to illuminate and explicate in so horrendously awkward ways that you want to stand in front of a display shelf at a shop in the cold section of the downtown mall and just weep. There are covers to books, to films, that are so absurdly inaccurate you have to wonder if it is simply not ignorance on the part of the artist or designer, but actual malice or fear in operation.
For whatever reason, I've decided to consider some of these covers here, and this time it happens to be all-Heinlein (well, two-Heinlein, anyway).
Can anyone find the Black writer on this cover?
How about the Native American protagonist of this book?
(I'm assuming the green skinned woman on the Boris Vallejo cover of
To Sail Beyond the Sunset is artistic license.)
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