Harry Potter Covers Re-Imagined
Creating children’s book covers has got to be a difficult job. Certainly a difficult job to do well. That split second where a kid eyes a book is so often a make or break moment. In person, those associated with the creation of cover art probably make good first impressions. Other people’s moms likely love them.
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While I sometimes feel a particular cover doesn’t help a book, I’m usually at a loss to offer any way to improve the situation. Illustrator M.S. Corley is much more bold. He has taken the Harry Potter covers, given them a retro, “classic Penguin” treatment, and posted the results for all to see. Fun to look at – how do you think they’d fare among young readers?
(Thanks to BuzzFeed for the link. Click the image below to view the article)
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About Travis Jonker
Travis Jonker is an elementary school librarian in Michigan. He writes reviews (and the occasional article or two) for School Library Journal and is a member of the 2014 Caldecott committee. You can email Travis at scopenotes@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter: @100scopenotes.
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Nice. I think this cover would have done… well, I was about to say “better with older readers than the original,” but when your counterfactual involves Harry Potter selling better, it’s just not very plausible, is it?
Nevertheless, I adore this cover, but think it would have failed to attract the younger readers who I think were the book’s initial base.
I like these graphically, but I agree with Elizabeth, I’m not sure the vintage look would have attracted kids as much as the more contemporary (and more colorful) ones. On the other hand, its hard to think that the covers were really the instrumental thing in Harry Potter becoming what it did – marketing matters, visual appeal matters, but this may be a nice example of a series that was going to get big no matter what the outside looked like.
Emily and Elizabeth, I concur. These covers would appeal more to older readers than younger ones – and probably to folks who are already fans of the series, rather than attracting new followers.
Howdy just wanted to give you a quick heads up. The text in your content seem to be running off the screen in Firefox. I’m not sure if this is a formatting issue or something to do with browser compatibility but I figured I’d post to let you know. The design and style look great though! Hope you get the problem resolved soon. Thank
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