Posted by Marian Lizzi
It’s always great to hear that our Subsidiary Rights team has sold translation rights for one of our books. It’s happy news for the author as well as for everyone who worked on the book. New readers in faraway lands—every author and editor’s dream.
What’s less certain is what the book will look like in its new, translated edition. Taste in book covers varies widely around the world, as a quick glance at the Freakonomics foreign editions page makes eye-poppingly clear. What makes a cover design work brilliantly here in North America but look dated, random, or just plain unattractive overseas?
Beats me.
Here at Perigee, we’ve received some beautiful foreign editions of our books. Some of them remain pretty true to our original design. For example, here is our cover of Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED with the UK edition (in hardcover….more on the paperback in a moment).
Our edition:
UK edition:
Here’s our cover of Keri Smith’s This Is Not a Book with the German edition – a lovely hand-drawn rendering that approximates Keri’s original version:
Our edition:
German edition:
And some of them present a lovely surprise – an entirely new design in a direction we hadn’t chosen but which works quite nicely. For example, Signe Pike’s Faery Tale.
Our edition:
UK edition (to be published by Hay House next year):
However.
It’s also a fairly common occurrence in the life of an editor to receive a stack of freshly printed foreign editions only to spend several minutes trying to figure out what book it is.
Here are a few examples we happen to have on hand – recent foreign editions of titles from our backlist (expertly photographed by me in my office).
Help Your Baby Talk
Our edition:
Korean edition:
The Insomnia Answer
Our edition:
Complex Chinese Edition (Yes, that's a sleeping polar bear.):
What’s the Worst That Could Happen? (A book about climate change)
Our edition:
Korean edition:
Whatever works….
And finally, sometimes a foreign publisher changes a book’s title (just as US publishers sometimes do when we publish a book that originated abroad). A case in point: Reading the OED (again). For their paperback edition, Penguin UK decided to change not only the cover design but the title itself. The result?
If you’re wondering what the title means, you’ll have to read the book.
Just kidding. It means a love for words.
I wonder if there’s a word for a love of foreign covers. I’ll have to ask Ammon. It would surely come in handy around here.
If you have a favorite foreign cover (funny, strange, beautiful, etc), feel free to email me about it at Marian.Lizzi@us.penguingroup.com, or comment below.
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