The Associate (cover)
The new John Grisham novel, The Associate, released today, was displayed on the front table, visible from the outside as I waited for the doors to be unlocked. The title, however, was a mystery: sale-price stickers blocked part of it out, so it looked like it was called The Ociate.
These sales stickers are the bane (well, one of many banes) of a bookseller’s existence. Some of us, after all, cling to the belief that people might benefit from knowing what the items that they are seeing actually are. Our default stickers (though we have started getting smaller ones very recently) are right triangles, about two inches on a side, to be slapped onto the upper left corner of a cover.
This causes problems with many book covers, but is even worse with CDs. And the CD problem is complicated by all the other gunk that gets put on the front cover. We put the price stickers (about two inches long and one inch tall) on the front. We alos have stickerst touting the best of the back catalog. And the record companies often have their own stickers on there (”We desperately hope that someone will play these five songs on the radio!”). Given that the booklet covers of CDs are less than five inches on a side, we’ve had situations where only a couple of square inches of a cover peek out from behind the noise, giving no hint as to the title or artist.
Still, it could be worse. As it is, The Associate became The Ociate. Imagine if the other half of the word was what remained visible…
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