Note: Despite its discussion of giving out "spoilers" for The Cat Who Tailed a Thief and The Cat Who Sang for the Birds, the following column does not contain any actual spoilers itself.
I'd like to take time to talk about a topic that might seem fairly trivial in the whole cosmic scheme of things but which I think holds some immediate relevance considering the imminent release of The Cat Who Saw Stars. Namely, I'd like to talk about the changes we've seen in the dust jacket lately. Yes, yes, I know, insert a collective "who cares?" here, but I'm yammer on about it, because I think I have a point.
The most noticeable difference between the "old" and the "new" jackets is the style of the front cover design, due to the (apparently permanent) departure of Jill Bauman as cover artist. I loved Ms. Bauman's art - it had its own little niche in the Cat Who... universe - and I can't imagine why Putnam discontinued using her (pure speculation, but price might have had something to do with it - judging from her portfolio, many authors and publishers call upon Bauman's talents, and her increasing popularity might have caused her to either raise her rates or turn down smaller jobs in favor of more lucrative ones). We now have a new artist on the job, one Walter Harper, and, after getting off to a shaky start with bland-but-serviceable Saw Cheese (hard)cover and the downright gaudy Tailed a Thief cover, he's produced a couple of quite beautiful jackets for Sang for the Birds and Saw Stars. It's not Bauman, but I'm not complaining (not any longer, at least).
While the cover art has been the most noticeable change, it is not, as far as I'm concerned, the most important. That honor - or, in this case, dishonor - would go to the inside-cover blurbs - the paragraphs printed on the dust jacket flaps that describe (or hype, if you prefer) the book's premise in order to attract potential readers. I do like to scan the blurbs before starting in on the mystery itself - they inform me on what to initially expect, they whet my appetite for reading the book, and they just, in general, seem the right place to start. Lately, however, I've been informed just a little *too* much.
Don't know what I'm talking about? Get your hands on a hardcover copy of Tailed a Thief or Sang for the Birds and you'll see what I mean. Tailed a Thief's jacket details every major plot twist in the mystery, up to the middle of Chapter 16 (out of a nineteen-chapter book, mind you), plus heavy implications as to the very identities of the culprits. Same deal with Sang for the Birds - the crucial events through Chapter 16 (out of, again, nineteen) are once more divulged, leaving only the climactic confrontation undetailed. What we basically have here are Putnam's Condensed Book Jackets. What is it with the publicity people? Do they want allowing their customers to dispense with the laborious inconvenience of having to actually BUY a book, carry it home, and read through all its pages by just squashing the plot down to four easy-to-scan paragraphs within the book jacket? Or are they just sacrificing a potential reader's enjoyment of the book by describing *all* of its action under the guise of the plot's premise, so that a potential buyer will think the book holds more action than it does?
This sounds like I'm nitpicking, but I do think I have a reasonable point here. I'm not being unrealistic for expecting the inside cover blurbs to be "safe", for they ARE publicity material; the publisher expects me - encourages me, in fact - to read them in the bookstore, before I've made my purchase. And yet, in an effort to mislead the consumer, they've deliberately included information that compromises my enjoyment of an item for which - let's face it, hardcover books are *not* cheap nowadays - I paid a goodly amount of money.
Which brings me to our public service announcement - if you're planning on buying The Cat Who Saw Stars in hardcover when it's first released in January, don't read the dust jacket until youve finished the book. I, for one, am not taking chances this time.
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