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Why are scraggly trees covering thrillers these days? I was just speaking about this last night with my publisher who’s in town for a visit. He said he’d put a tree on a cover but with the font choice it looked too much like a thriller, so he had to change it.
Following the initial breakthrough of John Grisham’s best-selling legal thrillers, it felt as if every crime book cover sported a gavel, a pair of scales and a statue of justice (plus or minus a dagger or a letter opener). Today, for reasons I cannot fathom, trees are in. Could it be that some designer a few years back had a traumatic and formative experience in his childhood and still wets his bed following recurring nightmares involving menacing trees whose branches sway in the breeze and now believes we all suffer from the same affliction?
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June 22nd, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Lemme take a crack at this: trees on thrillers. Well, there’s fear of the unknown (forests, water), the fact that trees can look almost human (the limbs), and then there is their size and the fact that they can loom over a person. There is something creepy about a leafless tree.
Or yes, perhaps all book designers have been traumatized by The Teddy Bears’ Picnic as a child.
June 23rd, 2007 at 5:48 am
Hardwoods might look like thrillers, bare and scratchy and “Gonna get ya.” But you want spooky? Black spruce. Fir in a pinch, but some tall and out-of-place black spruce, raggedy beautiful but strange. Hardwoods are for wimps.
June 23rd, 2007 at 12:21 pm
The real reason could be all those mentioned, or it could be because the Art Director just found a bunch of copy-right free images in some mass market mail out sampler from ClipArtsR2Fun.net.