The libraries in those mansions sound great. They’d be worth searching out on a trip sometime. {SMILE}

Yes, sets of books have some of the same effect. However, the sets i’ve seen are enough smaller, the effect is distinctly more limited than what you’ve described. {Smile}

I think I was trying to say that. I agree that combining elements in covers can only go so far before the system falls apart. {resinged smile} I would like to see a better way to catch the eye while conveying what the book is about. {Smile}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

A company i work for has a party every year at one of the old vanderbilt mansions in New York City, in the library. It has aone wall of matching books, and bunches of other walls with bookslike we see them now.

I have also been to FDR’s house upstate, and another vanderbilt mansion, and they both had matching books in their libraries. Now that I think about it, I have been to Theodore Roosevelt’s house as well, but I don’t recall that.

One way to get the same effect is to buy sets of books today. My mother in law does that.

As to the collaging of covers. Really, at some point all of this becomes just so much garbage, don’t you think? The constant attempt to create codes in covers may nto be as good as finding a completely new way of getting the interior of books known…

I’ve heard of such old libraries, where the books match each other, and add to the decor. I’ve never seen one, tho. I guess Hawai’i was settled too late to have many, and I haven’t happened to run into any on my trips out-of-state. {Smile}

I think you’re right about the chainmail bikinis being for sword and sorcery. {Smile}

Another blog I frequent has been spoeculating a lot about how publishers could handle hybrid genres. The blog is dedicated to science fiction romance, so they have that problem. Most suggestions seem to involve different ways to have characters int he foreground reflect the romance, while the background or setting reflects the science fiction. That works as long as you’re only combining two genres, but I’m not sure if you could combine three or more genres in one picture. I believe Tia said your Year of the Horse combines four. I could see having multi-racial characters in a western setting, but I’m not sure how to add in YA and fantasy. {smile} A collage might have to be the way to go when you have three or more genres. {lop-sided smile}

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin

For that purpose I have decided that my next book, no matter the content, will be titled – “Oprah says that eating whatever you want and having multiple orgasms will make you thin and financially secure”

Think that will sell copies?

It’s funny about those covers with the chainmail bikinis. The point I was really trying to make in the essay was that, often as not such a thing is nowhere to be found in the book. Tia is right, the covers are coded. Those chainmail bikinis are to let us know, I think, that there will be swords and sorcery inside – reminiscent of Conan the Barbarian… I soooooo wanted a chainmail bikini on the cover of my first book, but alas… The problem with the codes, I was trying to suggest, is when a book needs multiple codes, you know? Covers can’t be collages, I don’t think (actually they often are, but still within code).

Anne Elizabeth Baldwin