Anne of Green Gables is now a blond Playboy centerfold
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Anne is a very strongly moral character, if you read the whole sereis from the first book to "Anne of Ingleside" where she's a mother of 7 (as she says "only 6 living" - as her first child dies after 12 hours). This is horribly offensive, especially referring to the first book when she's only just 16 at the end!
I bet this is a bottom-of-the-range publisher that does cheap editions of out-of-copyright books, and they get their covers by getting someone in the office to google around for images that are in the public domain that they don't have to pay for, and there is no-one there who has read the book.
Ha! Nice Onion link.
The book cover thing is depressing. It's not the first time the makers of some kind of media have chosen to portray something incorrectly so it can be more sexist. It's like they they think, oh shit this thing is not sexist enough! We better do something about that!
Just look at any historical movies etc where women fulfill modern beauty standards and never do anything of note, unlike the important men.
That is wrong in so many ways - for a start have they even read it? Her red hair is what half the story is about (trying to dye it, Gilbert teasing her about it, Mrs Rachel saying it makes her look 'homely' so she's rude to her). And another big part of it is that she doesn't consider herself beautiful (and in fact probably isn't conventionally attractive until she gets older) so she'd hardly be the type to stand pouting at the camera with her chest pushed out (she's also very skinny so where are those curves supposed to have come from?)
How depressing that using a sexist, cliched and irrelevant image on the cover is seen as the only way of getting girls to read a classic book 
WTAF??!! Do people never read the books they get covers for?
There is so much wrong with that cover, I can't even...
Sexualised pose, plaid shirt, blonde hair?!!! Do the people who put this cover on have any idea WHEN the book is set?
BTW, SGM, your blog is ace. I may not always agree with everything you say, but I love how you say it.
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DEAR GOD Stewie - I thought you meant that Megan Follows had dyed her hair & posed for Playboy! My stomach was all a-plummet and I was too frightened to click the link.
I am relieved to discover that I was mistaken. But pretty horrified at that new cover, all the same.
can we think of similar inappropriate covers
how is this for a cover of a biography of emily davison
It's not a proper publishing house. It looks like one of those self-publishing outfits - someone is just trying to make a buck out of the fact it's out of copyright, and has stuck a picture of a young woman on it without thinking/really knowing what the book is about.
I think it says more about some idiot's idea of what a default young woman looks like than a deliberate attempt to subvert the character - my guess is that they don't know the book at all and don't realise how inappropriate it is.
Of course I'm not saying it's not problematic that someone's idea of a young woman is a blonde pouty sexualised young thing.
Anne of Green Gables was a role model for generations of girls who grew to learn that their lack of conventional 'beauty' was less important than their character, their relationships, their love of books.
This cover is seriously naff. It is a travesty of the book. And yes, it is a sexualised pose.
LOL drwitch. Am just imagining Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm in a catsuit.... possibly Jo March in a bikini...
or the velveteen rabbit as a bunny girl 
Not only was she a red head, she was skinny and eleven years old. She was a LITTLE GIRL. Not a blonde, curvy teenager.
Fastidia, I couldn't agree more sad
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Dear God I'm horrified by that.
The whole thing about the book is that she doesn't look conventionally attractive.
The onion link was hilarious!
That book... anyone else immediately think of Dawson's Creek when they saw it? Which was of course was about oversexed teeangers who lived in a small town..
Can you imagine Marilla allowing her to wear that shirt?
<faints>
Well my point about the publisher is that it actually makes me less angry about it, in a way, because it means that the choice of picture hasn't gone through a marketing department in a publishing house. There hasn't been an involved commercial decision process to choose THAT photo: we are literally looking at someone operating out of their back bedroom slapping pictures on out-of-copyright books and hoping that someone will stumble on them in an Amazon search. So this actually makes me feel slightly better because it's about a dubiously well-read and slightly opportunistic individual buying into porn culture and hoping others will fall for it, rather than something systemic within a particular "real" publisher making them think it's a good commercial decision to choose a picture like that.
(pace the fact that publishing is not the most pro-feminist of professions anyway; and the fact that the individual contributes to a patriarchal system etc etc)
It's on Amazon because the self-publishing platform it's produced on is owned by Amazon and that's how it gets distributed. I doubt Amazon holds its self-publishers up to any standard of any kind of merit or appropiateness at all: artistic, literary etc. I guess it cares about whether the pictures and text are used legally, and that's about it, unfortunately.
No no no no no no no NO NO I am enraged and devastated all at once.
FairPhyllis - exactly. It's still crappy but that's probably how it came about, not via people who had read the book sitting in meetings agreeing it was appropriate.
Yes Tunip. I mean, the pic is ridiculous, but it's just so bad that I actually find it kind of funny now. I would be a LOT more worried and pissed off if it had been any kind of more institutionalised decision.
I looked on the self-publishing site and loads of people have tried to do the same thing with AOGG, with fairly mixed results on the cover art, but that is still the worst one.
I understand why it means a lot to people here (and I do adore the books) - I think I just tend to save the anger for egregiously institutionalised porn culture (notwithstanding the fact that the individual concerned is the product of institutionalised patriarchy etc etc).
Looking at the next picture down - the first of 'for the record, this is what Anne is supposed to look like' - it's the picture that still makes my heart sore for her being a little girl all alone in the world. Anything else is a travesty.
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