Flashback to ’05. It’s my first year as an elementary school librarian and I’m eager to share my personal favorite books to students. I love Roald Dahl and I especially loved his funny, exciting, and poignant “Boy: Tales of Childhood“. Our library didn’t own a copy, so I fired off an order and waited with anticipation of how I was going to promote it to high heavens and watch the circulations pile up. When it arrived I pulled it out of the box and saw this:
It’s an unfortunate cover. An otherwise stellar book that is covered in something less than kid-friendly. Sure enough, try as I might, “Boy” was an extremely hard sell. Come to find out this is the cover for adult readers. Luckily there are many other versions available.
About Travis Jonker
One name: Richard Cuffari. Ubiquitous in the 1970s and 80s, yet any book with his cover is doomed in my library. Very sad. Check out the site http://jacketwhys.wordpress.com/ for a lot of good stuff on covers.
Thanks for the cover info – I’ll have to look into this further. Amazing how much power covers hold. I like the site as well, already added it to my reader.