I’m a cover artist, so I can’t help but Google book cover art to see what I can find. What can one expect? With no formal art training, I have to get my education somewhere.

So I find a page full of early Harlequin paperback cover art, and I’m utterly fascinated. So this is pulp fiction, dime novels, trashy romance, and all that jazz. This is where those phrases originate.

So I’m looking at these pages, trying to imagine the average housewife of those times looking at the covers and itching to buy the books. I imagine the artists getting the art direction and then cranking out the same style stuff, and I wonder if some of the e-publishers today would come out looking like that to some other cover artist in the far-off future, when he or she looks up book cover art for research, like I did, and stumbles on a bunch of digitally painted or 3D rendered cover art.

And I’m looking, and looking. Every cover has the same style—so consistent, so trite, so boring. Busty women with rounded thighs and flawless-looking ’40s and ’50s hair, all in very dramatic poses. Then out of the blue, a cover jumps out at me, as it must have jumped out at the reader as it sat on the shelves with the other dime novel romances, and I’m not entirely sure if I would really want my covers to stand out in the same way. Stand out, yes, but please, not in quite that way. On the second page, among all the renderings of the curvy ’40s and ’50s women, this is the cover that jumped out at me.

Truly unusual cover for a romance novel, if you ask me.

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