When "Frankenstein" was released in 1818, there was no way Mary Shelley had any idea how widely read and culturally relevant her prose would be in the 21st century.
There is also no way she could have imagined her book the way it was released by the Penguin Group in 2005. The cover resembles a box in a graphic novel – a yellow-skinned and nervous Victor Frankenstein with a modern haircut shakes and sweats on the lower right side of the page, and a text box bemoaning the wretch he created lingers just left of his head.
The cover was part of a series of classic books Penguin released that year with covers inspired by graphic novels. While the floating text might have been unusual, the idea behind the cover has been around since before, well, "Frankenstein."
"I don't know if there's really been a switch (in the book publishing industry). It comes from the growing popularity of graphic novels," said Rhonda Winchell, the marketing manager for the University of Nebraska Press. "There's a new audience to introduce the books to."
Winchell said that while the university press hasn't released any books with covers that resemble comic books, they are constantly trying to find ways to get their books to appeal to a younger generation.
"Our mission is to take a something that's a classic and give it a fresh look," she said.
Winchell said some of the books published by the university press have covers more modern than the author of the text would have pictured. This fall, they released a collection of short stories by Harold Lamb collectively titled "Swords from the West." Lamb wrote the short stories and novellas in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. He died in 1962, never having seen a book cover like the one on his book, which has two men on horseback clashing swords. The art looks like a combination of "Dragon Ball Z" and a Disney movie with the book's title in a funky calligraphic font above the warriors.
Winchell said there is a balance a publishing house tries to achieve between marketing and maintaining the books' integrity.
Gregory Rutledge, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, doesn't judge books by their covers.
"Ultimately, (the book cover) isn't that important," he said.
He said he understands why someone would be cynical about an edgy cover; it attracts people to the book for the wrong reason, sensationalizes the story and tarnishes the book's integrity.
"But if it gets someone to read it and be captivated by the story," Rutledge said, "then that's a good thing."
Mike Burton, a 27-year-old graphic designer for a company called 160over90 in Philadelphia, started a three-year book cover project in 2005 while earning his master's from Kent State University. For the project, he selected six classic books, including "The Outsiders," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Lord of the Flies" and "The Great Gatsby," and created covers intended to attract junior high students to the books. Although the covers haven't been used by any publishers in the widespread production of those books, the designs have turned some heads and generated discussion among bloggers and writers interested in the topic.
"I was planning on directing the covers toward high school students," Burton said. "But when I talked to book publishers, they said, ‘The younger you can go, the better'."
Cinnamon Dokken, the owner of A Novel Idea Bookstore, 118 N. 14th St., said many of the book covers that get under her skin are the ones for books that were made into movies and then republished with the movie poster in mind. For example, when "The English Patient" was republished after the movie, the cover didn't address any of the themes the movie left out, she said.
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