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 for awhile 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 crazy covers.

I’ve twice before touched on photo covers of John Creasey’s novels, but when you’ve written over 600 books, there’s lots of options to choose from. In honor of an upcoming episode of Spybrary’s Spy Rewind feature looking at the 60’s tv adaption of his Baron series, I thought I’d focus specifically on covers for the Baron. They did not disappoint!

Know of any more good ones I missed? Sound off in the comments below!