Worst covers ever ?

       The Literary Saloon post that attracted the most visitors to the weblog for any one-day period appeared exactly a decade and a day ago -- and, ironically, given how little attention I pay to book covers, it was about a book cover, suggesting that this was quite likely the most depressing cover of that year:



       Yes, the tie-in cover that saw Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights billed as: "The inspiration for the MTV original film" ('starring' Erika Christensen, Katherine Heigl, and some guy who played one of the brothers on Malcolm in the Middle) was always going to be hard to beat -- but now it has competition.
       Leave it to professional dilettante James Franco to top the untoppable, defacing another classic, with:



       The reaction re-posted at Slate sums it up nicely.

       I won't pass up this opportunity to make my pitch for the plainest of covers (for all books !) yet again. Consider, for example, how the Germans did this Faulkner (in at least one of the editions ...):



       Sold ! (And I love the rows of Bibliothek Suhrkamp titles on my shelves, all the same handy size, all of the same uniform design, with just the colors of the covers differing from book to book.)

       (Admittedly, the bulk of my Faulkners are the wonderful mass-market paperback-sized Vintage ones, à la:



       Yeah, those are pretty good, too.)