Books and their covers

I realize that I am very lucky to have had my books translated into many foreign languages. I am extremely grateful to the translators who have taken such care with the texts, the publicists who have got buyers elsewhere to notice what has been written by an unknown Brit, and the publishers who have produced such lovely books and generously donated multiple copies to an author who in several cases cannot actually read a word of the language concerned.

It has however produced its own space problem. I am still unpacking books from the university and college offices I vacated more than two years ago now (retirees beware) and I am trying to organize them in some kind of logical order. Many of the latest boxes I opened turned out to contain nothing other than “translations of me”. I think there were about 500 copies altogether, many metres of shelf space. I am useless at disposing of things, but my assistant rightly insisted that they needed to be sorted into different “language piles” and then WEEDED. I could not devote a whole shelf to books in (for example) Polish, which I couldn’t read and didn’t plan to learn! A few copies of each, one for me and a couple to use as presents, should be plenty.

It started off as a rather dreary task, as I struggled to make myself consign some of these precious books to the “unwanted” pile. But, partly to distract myself, I ended up pondering on the sometimes very different jacket designs for the same books – and on what that said about the publishers’ view of my writing and its likely audience, as well as national jacket design conventions. (And there certainly are such conventions in book production: I can often tell a book produced in the USA from one produced in the UK, though I’m not exactly sure how.)

SPQR is a good case in point. Some foreign editions, as you see, had stayed with the original British version (a low-key laurel wreath against a marble wall). But others had given it a rather more militaristic (even fascist-style) eagle. I suspected that they were playing to a slightly different audience and to more macho fans of Roman history – but I then realised that one of those eagles had nicely featured on the British cover of my Emperor of Rome (macho? moi?). Pompeii sees different changes, but several of these foreign-language covers had featured a pensive woman from some great hit of Pompeian art. The original British version had some rather jolly frolicking cupids in place of honour (later replaced by a photograph of me at Pompeii, I confess). No such fun in these overseas editions, but a gesture to the poignancy of the Pompeian story, and an eye on the female reader?

The biggest changes, however, are on the cover of Women and Power. Both the UK and US editions had a geometric pattern on the cover (I remember it was partly chosen to look a bit like a Christmas bauble, for a Christmas market!). Other countries went in other directions. You see the Slovak version here (pink power?); and I am not sure what to make of the Thai edition, though I quite like it.

On other occasions, let me say, the cover remains the same, but the title has been changed. I was never quite sure why the title of Confronting the Classics became Cleopatra’s Nose in German!

So, this is what has kept me going over the last couple of days. But what, you will ask, is happening to all the weeded specimens? Well, I gave some, a while ago, to a foreign language library in Gateshead, and I hope to send more there. And I hope that some will be picked up from the “cast-offs” pile by students in the Cambridge Faculty of Classics, who come from all over the world. Then the rest (if anything’s left) will, I fear, be recycled.

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