{"id":10917,"date":"2013-05-15T06:00:42","date_gmt":"2013-05-15T10:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=10917"},"modified":"2013-05-15T06:00:42","modified_gmt":"2013-05-15T10:00:42","slug":"great-new-covers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=10917","title":{"rendered":"Great New Covers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I know I often use this space to complain about book covers. But I&#8217;m happy to report that today I want to sing the praises of a new series of books from Vintage Children&#8217;s Classics.These books originated in the U.K. as Random House books and they are quite simply, stunning.<br \/>\nThis line of books has a myriad of titles, all of them good, and the covers are newly updated. What I particularly love is the clever use of the back cover. All the back covers have the standard book paragraph summary. What makes them different is the &#8220;Backstory&#8221; one-sentence summation of the book. For instance the &#8220;Backstory\u00a0of <em>The Railway Children\u00a0<\/em>is: Find out about steam trains and learn what it was really like to be a child in Edwardian times.&#8221;<em><\/em><br \/>\nOn the surface this one sentence is not that big a deal, but it is extremely helpful to have just one sentence that kids can read. Frankly, if this sentence pulls them in, then they&#8217;ll just start reading. And then, if the backstory isn&#8217;t enough, they&#8217;ve added a real teaser on all the books. For instance on <em>Five Children and It\u00a0<\/em>it says: Turn to page 11 to meet the Sand-fairy! Well, who&#8217;s not going to want to read to page 11? The teaser is accompanied by a lively, very kid-friendly illustration. All the books have this and I think it&#8217;s genius. It immediately engages the reader by bringing the story more to life and creating the element of surprise and suspense.<br \/>\nThe front covers are actually fairly simple, but they&#8217;ve struck the right tone. There is a good balance between appealing to kids and not being child-like. I especially love the cover for\u00a0<em>Five Children &amp; It.\u00a0<\/em> Very cleverly, there are only four children on the cover, which I already find intriguing. (I know there is a baby, but readers won&#8217;t and that&#8217;s a neat thing.) The Sand-fairy is large and kind of creepy looking, but not scary. These covers just draw you in and the books themselves feel good in your hand, furthering their appeal.<br \/>\nAre there any covers out that you&#8217;ve seen lately that have struck you as quite good?<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/fivechildren-2.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10920\" alt=\"fivechildren\" src=\"http:\/\/wordpress.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/fivechildren-2.jpg\" width=\"274\" height=\"400\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/tomsawyer-2.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10919\" style=\"border: 1px solid black;margin: 5px\" alt=\"tomsawyer\" src=\"http:\/\/wordpress.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/tomsawyer-2.jpg\" width=\"272\" height=\"400\" \/><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/railway-2.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-10918\" alt=\"railway\" src=\"http:\/\/wordpress.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/railway-2.jpg\" width=\"276\" height=\"400\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Good book covers are a wonderful thing; today we discuss some good new ones. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10917\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}