Look at that.
Isn’t that beautiful? The dead simplicity. The clean lines. The amusing irony of placing an ephemeral frippery like captioned animal photos into the iconic clothing of a century’s worth of literary classics.
It even has a penguin on it.
That right there is the cover I envisioned before the ink had even dried on the book contract. It’s all I asked for, and, given the incredibly timely merger of Penguin and Random House shortly after I began working on the book, I assumed it would be a no-brainer.
Alas, my fine editors don’t believe the blog-to-book buying public is smart enough to ‘get’ a literary sight-gag, and that the general American populace needs horrible fonts and full-color photos to make impulse purchases of humor books, so in one week you will not see this masterpiece of restraint and class sitting on shelves at your local booksellers, but rather the jaunty, glossy, high-def llama-and-word-balloon cover that someone in charge of making me wince dreamed up in a harshly-lit cubicle somewhere in the glimmering metropolis of depressing ideas we like to call New York.
And one week is not a very long time, friends and readers. It’s only like … six or seven days. And in that time, aside from the capslocked animals or radio silence I usually provide, you will also get the occasional rejected cover idea since I have hundreds sitting in a folder on my computer, each one a reminder that no matter how much of your artistic impulse you subsume to the will of the moneymen, they will always ask for more, leaving you a resentful, bitter husk, full of bourbon and bile, desperately searching the dim corridors of your broken heart for whatever joy or idealism once dwelled there.
… or that might just be me. Whevs.
Plus you’ve been raised not to judge books by their covers, yes? So when you look at the fruits of my labors, nestled between vegan cookbooks and celebrity nipple-slip compendiums on an Amazon ‘people who bought high-top Crocs also bought ______’ tab, do not judge it too harshly. Instead, buy it. Then wait for it to arrive, put your rubber-sheathed feet up, pop a Pepsi, and fold the glossy, jaunty cover right over, tuck it beneath your fingers, and judge the book by its content.
Which will be talking animals.
Duh.
All my love,
Justin V.
