True Story by Kate Reed Petty
The hardcover UK edition of Kate Reed Petty’s horror suspense thriller True Story features an unconventional layout showing four different potential covers with dramatically different designs. Changes in imagery and typeface (Greyton Script, ITC Benguiat, Cortado, and Helvetica) position the text in different genres. Separate editions were also produced featuring the different designs.
A writeup in Forbes, “Why UK Publisher Riverrun Created 4 Book Covers,” gives more context:
For the UK cover, Bethan Ferguson, Marketing Director for Quercus, riverrun and MacLehose Press, said that the imprint considered “conventional options,” but went with the four covers because of the nature of the text. “True Story is a brilliant and genre-defying novel about rape, memory and the nature of truth; we wanted the cover to honour and convey that,” Ferguson told me. “This book deserved a bolder approach to cover design. It felt right that we went with something that showed that this is a book playing with the idea of who gets to tell the story, and in what way. That’s what feels truly special about this book, and so that’s what we wanted for the cover. I’ve not seen this approach before and I think it feels very fresh and different.” […] “The four covers weren’t intended to appeal to different readers, but more to be representative of the different ways that Kate tells the story,” said Ferguson.
2 Comments on “True Story by Kate Reed Petty”
A lovely exercise in style! For another example of cover on cover, see Rubin Pfeffer’s jacket design for If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler from 1981:
I remembered the Reader’s Digest books, with four condensed novels in one volume.