Once in a while I search eBay for my name. Mostly I like to see if a seller has put up a scan of the cover of some mini-comic to which I contributed back in the eighties. It's always interesting to see how much I've forgotten about what I was doing back then. I've even seen magazines of my own that I didn't remember.

A couple days ago I came across something different. Someone was selling a copy of the mass market edition of Four For A Boy published by iBooks. What caught my eye was the cover. It was the cover that actually appeared on the book, which I had never seen on the web before.

Cover images need to be sent out to sellers long before books are published. In this case Poisoned Pen did not like the cover iBooks had designed (and already distributed an image of) and insisted on a change. Unfortunately, no online seller ever managed to get hold of a picture of what the book really looked like, until now. Someone ordering from, say, Amazon.com must have been surprised when they received a book which didn't resemble the one they thought they were purchasing.

At any rate, you can see the cover that never was above on the left. I'm not sure what those guys are doing. The real cover, below and to the right, looks rather like an old jewel encrusted codex.