Coincidental Covers: File Under & The Clockwork Sparrow

[Dante]

Seth has based an element of his ATWQ artwork on his own past work before now, so I was wondering if the fantastic cover of File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents was based on any other famous art? The reason I ask is because I've seen what looks very much like a homage to it. Below is the cover of File Under:



And this is the cover of Katherine Woodfine's The Clockwork Sparrow, published by Egmont, the U.K. publishers of ATWQ (who last we looked do have the U.K. rights to File Under):



Look a bit similar, don't they? It's almost uncanny in places.



So, is there an original source, is it a coincidence, or is The Clockwork Sparrow's cover a homage to File Under?

[Skelly Craig]

Remarkable! The more one looks at it the more one can see it.

1. Hangfire looks almost exactly like the gentleman in the upper left window in 'Clockwork Sparrow'
2. Snicket with the flashlight looks quite a bit like the thieving boy in the same window in CS
3. The door says "Closed", as opposed to "Open" like in CS
4. The prominent placement of 'Lemony Snicket' and '...Clockwork Sparrow'
And of course: 5. The color scheme, minus the red; and 6. The number (5) and shape of the windows. Oh, and 7. An animal in the upper middle window.

Do you know anything else about the book, Dante? It looks also like a mystery novel. The design looks very vintage, but apparently this has been published in 2015. So if anything, it's the designer of CS's cover that based it on File Under, right?

[bandit]

The Mystery Of The Clockwork Sparrow hasn't even come out yet! The most logical explanation I can come up with, since I think there's no way it's a coincidence, is that a designer at Egmont saw the FU13 cover and thought it very fitting for this book as well.

[Dante]

Mar 21, 2015 13:58:56 GMT -5 Skelly Craig said:

Do you know anything else about the book, Dante? It looks also like a mystery novel. The design looks very vintage, but apparently this has been published in 2015. So if anything, it's the designer of CS's cover that based it on File Under, right?

From what I've read, it's an Edwardian-era mystery set in a large department store. Whoever represents Egmont on social media has made at least one admiring comment about File Under's cover, so I was indeed wondering if there was a direct line of inspiration.