So a couple of days ago, I was looking at my shelf on Booklikes and saw that they were using the wrong cover for Cecilia Grant’s A Gentleman Undone: a Polish-language scholarly book on medieval history with a distinctly scholarly-book cover (sadly I didn’t take a screenshot and it’s fixed now! Does anyone have one?). Then this conversation happened on twitter:
[transcript of screencapped twitter convo:
Jackie Barbosa (@jackiebarbosa): Well, it certainly doesn’t look like anything anyone would be embarrassed to read on the subway!
Cecilia Grant (@Cecilia_Grant): Maybe this will be the next trend in erotic romance covers! The scholarly look!
Isobel Carr (@IsobelCarr): So tempted. May need to make a scholarly book cover for my site.
Jackie Barbosa (@jackiebarbosa): I know. I was thinking of trying it on something, just for funsies.
Me: Let’s start a meme!
Isobel: I suck at using GIMP, but I’m game to try.]
AND SO:
Inspiration: The English Town 1680-1840 by Rosemary Sweet. Image credit: Covent Garden Market, Westminster Election by Rowlandson and Pugin, via Wikimedia Commons.
Inspiration: The Jew in the Literature of England by Montagu Frank Modder. Image credit for the penny: photo by Detecting on Wikimedia Commons.
Inspiration: miscellaneous, but the formatting is from the Lancaster Pamphlets series, especially The Great Reform Act of 1832 by Eric J. Evans. I tried to do a weird background image with an old map of London but my GIMP skills were not sufficient to get the right look. Image: Redouté’s “Peruvian lily (Alstroemeria pelegrina)” from a Dover clipart book I have.
And a couple of bonus covers of two of my favorite classic historicals:
Inspiration: the Dodo Press edition of Godwin’s memoirs of Wollstonecraft. Image credit: victorianclassicantique.tumblr.com. If anyone knows the source beyond that, let me know!
Inspiration: Britain Before the Reform Act: Politics and Society 1815-1832 by Eric J. Evans. Image credit: Rob and Lisa Meehan’s photo on Wikimedia Commons.
ETA: At Cecilia Grant’s request, I did The Black Moth too:
Inspiration: Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650-1838 by Barbara Bush. Image credit: This photo by D. Gordon E. Robertson via Wikimedia Commons.
Other authors’ covers: Isobel Carr, Jackie Barbosa, Olivia Waite, Ros Clarke.
What romance would you like to see with a scholarly cover?
ETA: I made a bunch more of these during my True Pretenses blog tour, for books by JR Ward, Meredith Duran, Theresa Romain, Molly O’Keefe, Susanna Fraser, and of course TP itself.
ETA2: Part 3. Listen to the Moon plus 10 more romances requested by commenters.