L.M. Montgomery

Back in the 1980s, Lucy Maud Montgomery's books all featured the same cover template, with fake-script lettering and photo-realistic(-ish) cover illustrations. Frequently, the heroine stands in tall grass in some sort of meadow, looking wistful. While I currently have a few of her books on my shelves, they are not the best examples of the mooning-in-a-meadow cover style, but it was rampant for the designs on books I originally acquired in the late eighties.


This copy of Anne of Green Gables is only about ten years old. I bought it for a university course I was taking, knowing that my original copy was a) an eight-hour trip away from my school and b) in lousy shape, the cover having pulled off years earlier. My original copy (from Scholastic) had a photo from the 1985 mini-series, but showed a nearly identical scene to this illustration--a kid, in a hat, clutching her carpet bag at the train station. (Although, Megan Follows may have been sitting on the bench that is behind illustration-Anne, here.)

This isn't a bad or cheesy cover, and probably would have solved some of my childhood puzzlement over what a "carpet bag" might be. Looks like what I imagined wasn't too far off (i.e. a bag made of a rug).





This cover is closer to the standard Montgomery cover-concept I described in my first paragraph: costumed girl in the foreground, a building of some kind (school house or beloved family home, usually) in the background, a prominent tree or treeline, a field in which we find our heroine knee-deep. Usually, the heroine is a little further back than Anne, here, more indistinct, and certainly not looking directly at the reader.

This setting does suit the character of Anne. It starts getting absurd when it is slapped on any female character Montgomery every wrote. See: Pat, Valancy, etc. This is, however, one of the worst illustrations of Anne I've seen on these books. That nose just isn't working for me.





This is a copy of a Montgomery book that I 've had since I was a child, and it seemed pretty unusual to me at the time, both because of the relatively abstract cover illustration, and because of its size--trade paperback. At the time, I don't think mass market trade paperbacks were all that common. It seemed like that format really caught on about ten years later.

I honestly didn't like this cover when I was a kid. The colour scheme is a bit garish, and of all the possible characters that might have been used to represent the book, I didn't understand why the artist settled on Gay Penhallow (I think--at least, Gay's the only character who could be described as girlish, like the young lady picture here), whose story I found both dull and aggravating. I liked Donna and Peter's story best.




This book was second-hand, so I can't take all the blame for the fact that it's held together with a rubber band. (The damage is to the spine, so the book is in two hunks). This is the best of the covers, I think. It's original compared to the photo-realistic Anne of Green Gables, and the illustration is suggestive of the book's content. As a bonus, the colour may be lime(ish)-green, but it's hasn't reached the 1970s level of garishness of my A Tangled Web's orange.

It's also probably the book I like best now, as an adult. It's contrived to the point of goofiness but it's a very charming story. Valancy is a more interesting character than Anne, and a little less annoying than Emily sometimes could be. (After the first book in her series, Anne could be a little too good, and Emily is sometimes embarrassingly intense in the way of self-consciously artsy girls in any era.)