Publishers are always looking to refresh the backlist of authors and sell more copies. In the 70’s the beautiful painted book covers went out of fashion and photo covers came into vogue. The UK publisher Fontana had paperback rights to many of the well known thriller writers of the time like Desmond Bagley, Alastair Maclean, Hammond Innes, Helen MacInnes and Eric Ambler. I would imagine that if you’re a successful writer the occasional wonky cover art comes with the territory but these covers in particular were very, very odd. Broken Covers is an occasional series looking at some of these covers.

Jack Higgins, the pen name of Harry Patterson, became a household name with his blockbuster book The Eagle Has Landed. However even he couldn’t avoid the wave of bad photo covers that was sweeping the publishing world.

Higgins nearly escaped my notice of bad covers, but a chance visit to a used book store in Paris revealed this beauty-

Once I’d found that, the game was on. After some further digging several more were found for the publisher Coronet. So take a look below and enjoy!