Sunday, March 29, 2015

Judging the Cover

People magazine printed a picture of the cover of the recently unearthed Harper Lee manuscript Go Set a Watchman.

The president of HarperCollins, the book's publisher, said the cover was meant to invoke the era of the time it was written (Lee wrote the manuscript in the 1950s and set it aside when her editor suggested she take a flashback of young Scout Finch's life and make it a novel instead. To Kill a Mockingbird was published then, in 1960).

I am sure the cover's stylistic resemblance to Mockingbird has absolutely nothing to do with HarperCollins taking every possible step to insure that Watchman is seen as a completed novel rather than a largely unedited manuscript that may or may not be worth presenting a store with a couple of your own copies of Thomas Sully's portrait of Andrew Jackson.

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