Behind the Cover is an occasional series on book covers and the stories that accompany them.
Cover images: the all-important marketing tool that can perfectly capture the content and feel of a book—or cause people to glance over it, bored. Some images we toil over, going back and forth between options because co-editors disagree, we disagree, or the perfect image remains elusive despite our perseverance. Then there are the no-brainers when the authors have pre-picked images that work perfectly and after the original design is chosen the image hardly gets a second thought.
Holocaust Survivors by Dalia Ofer, Françoise S. Ouzan, and Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz was one of the latter. The editors had a number of images they found at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. In image after image of expectant, haunting faces of liberated concentration camp prisoners, their eyes shone with a glint of freedom. After everything, they still had some hope for life. Perfect.
A few months later when it was time to publish the book, we faced a typical scramble to get a high resolution picture with proper permissions and then the book was off to press! It was the end of the year and as I headed upstate for the holidays, the only things on my mind were those sugar plums.
But then four months later, I found an excited email in my junk mail box. It was a woman asking about the image on the cover of Holocaust Survivors. Continue reading “Behind the Cover: The Improbable Story of the Image on the Cover of Holocaust Survivors” →
In his recently published book, The Polynesian Iconoclasm: Religious Revolution and the Seasonality of Power, Jeffrey Sissons explains the ten-year period during which Hawaiians, Tahitians, and other South Pacific island societies almost completely destroyed their religious temples and god figures. Later, the native religion and its symbols were replaced by the Christian religion, and the churches and laws that accompanied it. Below, the author shares the significance of the book’s cover, followed by images from the book, photos taken by the author’s son, Hugo.
