Mixing it up a little bit this weekend, but as well as looking at the book selections at the airport and the English language offers in any bookshops I encounter I also take a look at the books I can spot in translation – and the different covers they get… or otherwise. So here are a few that I’ve spotted on the last few trips.
Lets start with some Italian Julia Quinn! These are non-Bridgertons including some of my favourites – like What Happens in London and The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever. I’m always interested to see historical romance covers because they are so wildly different between the UK and the US even before you get to translated versions. In the UK these originally had line-drawn almost cartoon-y covers and now have been repackaged with headless torso photographs of men and or women to match the reissued Bridgerton books which are now getting the couples from the show on the cover as their series happens.
I thought this was really interesting – as well as the artwork on Husband Material, Love, Theoretically and the Ana Huangs, they’ve also kept the English titles. Now with Husband Material I can sort of understand that, because it’s so built in, but the others you could have changed it surely? All of these have the same cover design in the US and the UK so I’m wondering if this is a TikTok influenced thing: Have they kept the titles that people might have seen on English language BookTok? I don’t know, but I find it very, very interesting.
From Italy to Spain now, and next up is a previous Book of the Week – Jenny Jackson’s Pineapple Street, which has got the US cover, which I just think is too lairy compared to the UK one. I like the idea of the formal and fancy room, because it is a rich people problems book, I just think this is an ugly set of colours!
And finally here we have Spanish Sally Rooneys, which have got the English language cover concepts, but the titles translated and a few tweaks. Some of these have the same editions in the UK and the US and some don’t – I’m not sure which came first or whether it’s changed as she’s grown in popularity, but I do really love the covers her books get – they’re so distinctive and eye-catching.
Here endeth this Saturday’s trip through cover design, I hope you’ve enjoyed it – it may make a reappearance at some point in the future you never know…
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 