When publisher Richard Meibers started showing an upcoming fall thriller at BookExpo America, he kept getting the same response: everyone hated it. In retrospect, Meibers, who heads Boston's Martin & Lawrence Press, can see why. The jacket for The Wrong Abraham displayed a silver skyscraper (vaguely resembling one of the Twin Towers) with a ball of fire coming out of the top of it and, in the foreground, Meibers said, a man who "looked like a biblical prophet." The book, about a terrorist plot hatched in Boston—the building is the city's Hancock Tower—clearly needed new cover art. On the second go-round, Meibers and his designer came up with a less provocative picture: a gun sight, seen through binoculars, focused on the Hancock. But, as Meibers explained, even this new image wasn't working. "I got a call from my guy at Borders and he said that a gun sight is the kiss of death on a book ever since 9/11," Meibers said. Now The Wrong Abraham, which is by David S. Brody and bows in November, features an image of the Hancock Tower without that red gunsight centered on it. Meibers's experience speaks to a new sensitivity about cover images that suggest terrorism, as publishers toe a fine line between being evocative and being disturbing or distasteful.
Steve Hull, publisher of Justin, Charles, another Boston house, said that while he hasn't gone through what Meibers did, he would never do a cover jacket that featured a plane in a skyline near a building. "Post-9/11, our sensibilities have definitely changed [when it comes to cover art].... No one looks at the skyline as a benign and serene image anymore." Certainly the team at Warner Books never thought their initial image for Nelson DeMille's 2004 thriller, Night Fall, would upset that delicate "post-9/11 sensibility." An employee at the company, who asked not to be named, said the first cover for that novel, which posits that terrorism was behind the 1996 crash of TWA flight 800, showed a plane being shot down. The picture, clearly intended to imply terrorism, was too reminiscent of themes and images associated with September 11. The DeMille cover, which was altered to show a plane against a nondescript skyline (with no signs of danger), is, according to that employee, just one of a number of mystery and thriller covers that have gone back to the drawing board since 9/11.
When Vintage/Anchor was releasing its 20th-anniversary edition of Jay McInerney's 1984 debut smash, Bright Lights, Big City, associate director of publicity Sloane Crosley said she got a number of calls—mostly from the press—asking if the book's well-known cover, which displays a young urbanite facing the Odeon diner (a famed '80s haunt that figures in the book), with the Twin Towers looming in the background, would be changed. "People were curious about the image of the towers and wondered if we would subtly remove them," she said. "But I think the bookselling community knew we wouldn't change the cover of an iconic and consistent bestseller."
The imprint is, however, significantly altering the cover image of McInerney's latest novel, The Good Life, for the February paperback release. That book, published last January to mixed reviews, featured a provocative yet subtle photo of a cup and saucer covered with ash. (The picture, which was taken by Queyen Tran and ran in the New York Times on September 20, 2001, was shot in an apartment that faced the World Trade Center.) Crosley noted that the new direction has nothing to do with trying not to offend, and that the intention is to draw the focus away from the 9/11 backdrop of the book, which follows a group of Manhattan couples as they struggle through the aftermath of the disaster. The new paperback cover features a decidedly cheerier upside-down shot of a couple's legs, facing one another. As Crosley put it: "9/11 itself is in many ways the main character of the novel, but the new cover focuses more on the individual lives of the characters touched by that day."
