Thursday, 15 January 2009

Stock Madness A-Go-Go

I have a fondness for books set during the London Blitz, and this seems to be something shared widely if the number of crime novels set during same is anything to go by. I've read and enjoyed Barbara Nadel's two such books, After the Mourning and Last Rights, about a shell-shocked undertaker trying not to go to pieces every time the sirens start. I also have been trying to get a look at Andrew Taylor's Bleeding Heart Square, set in the 1930s and involving Oswald Mosley Brownshirt shenanigans. When I finally did see it, I noticed another of those stock photo replications I'm always yammering on about.

However, that's not all! A bit of snooping around online brought me to crime writing blog The Rap Sheet, which pointed out two more books with the same cover image.



Four books with one cover is pretty good, but it still doesn't beat the FIVE books with one cover image that I talked about in my second-ever post.



Can anyone beat five?
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10 comments:

  1. Ian Koviak16 January 2009 at 14:09

    oooh. That hurts...

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  2. Steerforth17 January 2009 at 00:41

    I agree about the Blitz. It's fascinating that millions of people lived fairly normal, mundane lives in the midst of so much chaos.

    My mother was 11 when the Blitz started and remembers it very clearly. She recalls arriving at school the morning after a raid and seeing empty desks in the classroom.

    She says that people were fatalistic about being bombed and, as the saying goes, kept calm and carried on. The worst thing was not the bombs, but the hunger caused by rationing.

    I feel lucky to be able to talk to an eye witness and almost feel as if I have experienced it vicariously.

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  3. JRSM17 January 2009 at 04:10

    That would be fascinating! It's the "normality" of London life during the Blitz that fascinates me, too: everybody's doing their jobs or washing the dishes or eating out, and the bombs drop, and they hide under the table for a while, and some of them die, and then everyone else gets on with whatever they were doing before.

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  4. JMW18 January 2009 at 09:08

    Love your site.

    Katy Lederer's memoir Poker Face came out five years ago. There's a book just out that uses the exact same cover image. I, unhelpfully, can't remember the title of the new book, but I've seen it in stores a few times in recent weeks.

    http://www.amazon.com/Poker-Face-Girlhood-Among-Gamblers/dp/0609608983

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  5. JRSM18 January 2009 at 14:06

    Thanks, JMW: I will try and track down that other cover. The photo's by Donna Day.

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  6. Anonymous19 January 2009 at 12:18

    Great eye, CCC!

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  7. JRSM19 January 2009 at 14:24

    Thanks, Black Isle! And huzzah for tapirs and buffaloes!

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  8. JMW24 January 2009 at 22:24

    Well, I'm belated with this, but here's the book that shares a cover image with Lederer's Poker Face -- The Ladies' Lending Library, a novel by Janice Kulyk Keefer.

    What's interesting is that, on the Lederer cover, the woman is holding an ace of spades in her hand, showing it to the camera. In the Keefer photo, she's not. My first notion was that the ace was placed in for the Lederer cover, since it seems like an odd thing for a woman on the beach to be holding. But on the Keefer cover, the way she's holding her hand seems strange for someone not gripping anything. Huh.

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  9. Anonymous8 February 2009 at 19:15

    Here is a trio that I just happened upon that use the same image of leaves. The last one is not a total match (it takes four of the five leaves and re-uses them -- I'm pretty sure they're the same leaves, though). The Walden edition I have a copy of and I think its design is excellent. The other two designs I don't much care for.

    http://www.amazon.com/Walden-Yale-Nota-Henry-Thoreau/dp/0300110081/

    http://www.amazon.com/Diffusion-Innovations-5th-Everett-Rogers/dp/0743222091/

    http://www.amazon.com/Acquiring-Genomes-Theory-Origins-Species/dp/0465043925/

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  10. JRSM9 February 2009 at 15:22

    Thanks, Kevin: sharp eyes! I will post this now.

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