Why did this parody Bell Jar cover end up on a real ebook?
Our office can’t stop laughing at this: writer John Hornor Jacobs tweeted Wednesday morning that a parody cover he designed for The Bell Jar had appeared on a Kindle edition of the book, flagged by Aidan Hanratty (using the Twitter handle @Bandcloud).
Apparently, a joke cover I designed for Plath's The Bell Jar has ended up on a REAL Kindle edition, somehow. If you think that's weird, Donald Trump has become president. https://t.co/7xSgYVyb8a
— John Hornor Jacobs (@johnhornor) May 8, 2019
In 2013, after Faber’s chick-lit-style cover design for The Bell Jar drew some well-deserved controversy, Jacobs was one of many to weigh in with their own idea for a ridiculous cover on Twitter. His design was picked up by The Guardian, who featured it in a roundup.
“It just seemed to be funny to me to design a paranormal romance version of The Bell Jar,” Jacobs told me in an email. “I found the art online (sorry, I don’t have attribution since it was, as I thought at the time, a throwaway gag cover) and I designed it myself.”
Hanratty, who originally pointed out the mistake on Twitter, bought the book through Amazon last year and downloaded it to Kindle, but told me that the order link “goes to an error page now.”
