Vogue Magazine

· 📰 the tall but true tale of how a book's cover came to be 💃·

“The thing is that any sophistication I have, aesthetically, comes from Vogue [Magazine] and Harper’s Bazaar. In the 60’s I never missed an issue—even if I had to steal to get them.” ~ Patti Smith { in Interview Magazine }

There is a story I’ve been wanting to share for quite some time, but I never really found the space to tell it. You see, the front cover of my first book of poetry—featuring the top half of a naked woman showing a slight bit of side boob, but mostly her back (as a nod to the title, The Wingless) while crawling around in the dark—is actually only half of a photograph from a spread for Vogue Australia. I originally found it on Tumblr, then used TinEye to track it to the source—down to the exact date & issue of the magazine.

{ my book climbs a tree, arrives in a box, & takes a selfie with me for the first time }

When I contacted my editor to tell him that I’d finally found the image I wanted on the cover of my book—he laughed & told me to keep looking. First of all, it was a photograph taken by a fashion photographer who lived in NYC & whose work had graced the covers of multiple famous magazines...

Secondly, our budget was $200—which was shameful to offer even an amateur in the field. “Gerry” (my editor) has been in the business of publishing poetry since he founded the press—which he has almost single-handedly run & kept afloat since the 1970’s… I knew that I would do well to listen to him.

I went back to clicking through page after page of mostly dull copyright free images. In doing so, I was fairly dismayed to find where so many of the covers I recognized from shelves at bookstores had come from. Surely, it wouldn’t hurt to contact the editors of the magazine. So I wrote the following:

“To Whom It May Concern:

My name is Cecilia Llompart, and I have fallen in irrevocable love with a photograph from a 2009 issue of your magazine. I am a poet, and my very first book is about to be published by a small university press in the United States. They have, rather graciously, allowed me to suggest my own image for the front cover. While it has been suggested that I use an image that is in the public domain, I have scoured hundreds upon thousands of these... Many of which are intriguing in their own right, but none which captures the essence of my work. I am, quite frankly, tired of the same, droll, stuffy, unimaginative images that have dominated the covers of books for centuries. Don't judge a book by its cover, they say—but why not?