Aug 16
Jaouad’s Art Direction: This book is so awesome, there’s only one way to sell it: give it an awesome glittering metallic dustjacket, so everyone is blinded by its awesomeness. Also, make sure no one can read the author’s name.
Published 2002 or 2011
August 16th, 2012 at 10:01 am
This reminds me of when people used to cover their text books in school with wrapping paper. Somehow all the girls used to find the most sparkly paper… and bend space and time to keep the paper intact all year round!
August 16th, 2012 at 10:02 am
“Warning: Please keep indoors on sunny days”
August 16th, 2012 at 11:54 am
Haysi Fantayzee were real trend setters in the most unlikely places.
August 16th, 2012 at 1:58 pm
Ye olde hinges on the book cover never works for me. Kitty face runes on the other hand…
August 16th, 2012 at 3:21 pm
This is literally the worst book I have ever read.
I’m getting angry just thinking about it.
August 16th, 2012 at 5:11 pm
I notice nobody can work out whether it was published in 2002 or 2011. Does this mean the pages are glaringly shiny inside as well?
August 16th, 2012 at 5:55 pm
Overdid it on the fairy dust, didn’t they?
August 16th, 2012 at 9:07 pm
@THX: I didn’t dare open it, for fear of the fairies escaping and making a mess all over the other books.
Wikipedia says 2001. This edition may be a reprint.
August 17th, 2012 at 3:10 am
Ah, my cousin had this book– and I’m not sure even that photograph conveys just *how* shiny it is. As I recall, it’s actually holographic, so that there’s rainbow sparkles playing constantly over all that gold.
August 17th, 2012 at 4:45 am
Make it sparkly enough, people will buy it but never get around to reading it. It’s a win-win situation for both writer and readers!
August 17th, 2012 at 9:13 am
[Gollum voice] The light! It burnsss!
August 17th, 2012 at 9:14 am
Did you know there’s a hidden 3-D picture in that cover?
Keep staring at it up close and you see a huge t*rd…
August 17th, 2012 at 12:44 pm
@Rachel J: True! It’s a sight to behold, and I’ve tried my best to catch its full glory, but no simple photograph will do it justice.
August 18th, 2012 at 3:10 am
I can’t help but feel sorry for the hardworking artists at Baen. There they are, dedicating their lives to bringing us lovely sparkly metallic covers– and now Puffin has simply out-classed them, once and for all. I mean, this is *it*: the very shiniest book cover that has ever been, or ever will be.
August 20th, 2012 at 2:09 am
All the Fowl books have this glittery cover (the other has a blue one, so that’s less painful to look at.)
I think it’s a way to encourage you to open the book and look inside – because the cover’s so intense. In my bookshop I couldn’t put it out on the display table or the front window because when the light hit it there was a danger of headaches and seizures…
August 20th, 2012 at 7:53 pm
This happens to be a very good book, but I think they overdid it with the sparkly cover.
August 21st, 2012 at 4:05 pm
Poor Artem…all the kids made fun of him and called him Fowl. “Artem is fowl! Artem is fowl!”
October 5th, 2012 at 12:53 am
Please tell me that I’m not the only one who read the title as “Lion Golfer”. 🙁 It’s just so sparkly… It’s like they intentionally tried to obfuscate the title.
November 8th, 2012 at 6:09 am
Do you know what happens to that oh-so-sparkly cover once it’s dumped into a library system and 500 kids read/abuse it? I do, that was the copy I got to read. It looked like it was mauled by a pack of wild fairies. Great gouges of fold lines cut across gulfs of scuffed glitter, with tiny bits of shine here and there to hint at it’s once former glory….You couldn’t even see the “hinges” or “lock” anymore.
I saw a copy in a bookshop months later, and wasn’t even sure it was the same book.
Good read, though.
November 20th, 2012 at 6:36 pm
Who buttered the cover?