I have to say, I really admire the graphic designer who decided to put a blown-up image of a face on the cover of the Vintage Classics edition of the Steegmuller translation of Madame Bovary. My other favorite cover is the one chosen for the Standard Ebooks ebook, a painting by John Singer Sargent.
Vintage Classics
I’ve seen a lot of book covers, and I have to say, this one is really super amazingly effective in a world where we look at tiny thumbnails of books on little mobile device screens. And so I decided when I updated my We Love Translations page about all the Madame Bovary translations, I wanted to name and credit the graphic designer responsible for this remarkably memorable cover design.
That would probably be easy, if I had a copy of this specific edition, which I do not. Sigh.
Online, I can see that the copyright page names the person responsible for “book design”, but I worked for a book publisher and I’m pretty sure that’s referring to the interior design (fonts, margins, line-spacing, chapter decorations, etc.). The person who designed the cover could be someone else, and usually the credit for designing the book cover is on the back cover. Unfortunately, online samples and previews don’t typically include the back cover, just the front cover and a few pages from the beginning of the book. Sigh.
I decided to search Ebay. There are lots of people selling copies of this edition.
As you can see, sellers almost uniformly just use the default stock image.
However, some enterprising soul, attempting to sell an ex-library copy on Ebay for $5.99, uploaded no less than 7 separate photos of it. Photo #2 is the back cover! Hooray!
Cover painting: Detail, Princesse de Broglie, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.186).
Photograph © 1998 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Cover design: Abby Weintraub
Abby Weintraub, thank you for your bold decision. Live long and prosper.
The complete painting looks like this:
Standard Ebooks
Standard Ebooks are public domain ebooks produced to a high quality standard by volunteers who use files from Project Gutenberg. Public domain art is used as the basis for minimalist cover designs.
This is my second-favorite Madame Bovary cover:
Volunteers chose a different Sargent painting for the cover of Anna Karenina:
Standard Ebooks uses another Sargent portrait for The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, which I read recently, but I don’t like that portrait as much as these two.
Standard Ebooks isn’t the only publisher to favor these particular artworks:
I’m not much of an art historian; oil portraits don’t usually appeal to me. But these do. So I was happy to see some Sargent portraits at the Biltmore Estate when I visited in December 2023.
I heard about the artist long before that because I’d encountered this book when I worked for Princeton University Press:
I don’t think I ever looked into the pages of the book, though, so I wasn’t aware of the now-familiar portraits until they showed up as covers of the ebooks I was reading.
I wonder where I’ll spot them next!
