Coverlines (coverlines, cov-cov-coverlines)

A mag's cover is a mystery domain of perplexing alienness where established rules do not apply. You may, for example, edit a distinguished paper about illuminated manuscripts; a quarterly publication in a private circulation which - itself without illustration - discusses the art and attempts, for no practical reward, to identify the original "hand" of a quilly bonze between editions and counties. A lively letters column correspondence, now in its twelfth year, argues the provenance of the famous "Red Pages" of a prized Anglesey bible. Many of your readers are still alive.

This is what the coverlines will be for your magazine:

EXCLUSIVE!

FRIAR-ING TONIGHT!

SAUCY MARGINS - REVEALED!

SEE INSIDE!

There will be a photograph of a woman's face, possibly grinning to an inkwell.

We did realise one thing about coverlines though, which is that they're an excellent decoy for meddling publishers. Quite often a publisher felt they'd have to do something, whether or not anything was required to be done and, by company rules, no cover could be sent for printing without publisher approval. (Nobody quite knows why, because all publishers had exactly the same ideas about covers - ie, triple the number of exclamations and "Exclusive!"s - so there was never an opportunity to challenge the accepted wisdom, but hey, tradition.)

Craftily therefore we'd fake a sedately empty cover which merely emphasised the attractive game-related painting or photograph. (Come to think of it, women's faces did not appear. No wonder we were dead within five years.) The publisher, summoned to pass judgment, would trot in, cluck a tongue and spend twenty minutes adding exclams and "Exclusive!"s and so on before the page was arranged to his satisfaction while we looked on, theatrically trumped and lavishly abashed. The publisher would then scamper away with a whinny of creative supremacy and, wriggling sated in an office, forget to check up on us for the next fortnight.

AMIGA POWER - Victory Doesn't Always Need to Mean Having Someone Killed.