Only Revolutions - Cover

Cover

The cover of a spine, two front covers, and two inside flaps. The two front covers appear to be identical in all respects save two. On the dust jacket of the hardback edition, on one cover, the background image is a green eye flecked in the center with gold, and on the opposite cover, the background image is a gold eye flecked in the center with green. Second, the "O's" on the covers are printed in the color appropriate to the narrator, as described above. One of the soft-cover edition covers features a photograph taken on the road with mountains in the background, the partially cloudy sky, the distant mountains, and road are blue, and the areas aside the road are green with vegetation, and the "O"s in the title are a bluish purple. The other cover's photograph is much warmer in composition: it features a red desert at milestone 30 of a road in the southwestern United States, and the sky (as well as the road reflecting its tinge) are grey with a muted red. Accordingly, the "O"s in the title are brownish purple.

On both sides of the paperback edition, the "o"s in "a novel" and "Author of House of Leaves" are the same neutral grey, except in the word "House", which is blue. Similarly, there are three exceptions on the dust jacket to the rule that "O's" are printed in the color of the eye of the associated narrator. Two occur on the dust jacket covers, and they occur on both the gold cover and the green cover. The word "HOUSE" is printed entirely in blue, as it was throughout "House of Leaves," and the word "novel" is printed entirely in purple within the pupil of the eye on each cover. The third exception is the ISBN bar code on the spine; it is printed entirely in black, including zeros and the letter "O" in "fiction."

The covers are identical in the following respects. The pupil of the eye is entirely black save for the author's name, printed in an arc of white block letters around the top of the pupil, the name of the novel, printed in an arc of white block letters (save for the three "O's") around the bottom of the pupil, and the phrase "a novel," printed in purple lower-case lettering in the center of the pupil. Along the bottom of each cover is the phrase "author of "HOUSE OF LEAVES," printed in white lettering save for the word "house" as described above.

The spine of the dust jacket contains five elements. At the top and bottom of the spine there are two identical ISBN bar codes. Between the ISBN bar codes and the center of the spine are two identical (save for the "O's" as described above) circles with "Only Revolutions" in black block letters forming the top of the circle and the author's name forming the bottom of the circle, with the Pantheon logo in the center. In the center of the spine there is a single multicolored circle with two parallel black vertical lines in the center. The multicolored circle itself is green at the top and yellow at the bottom when viewed from the perspective of the green cover being the front. The area of the circle where green turns to yellow is shaded purple. The paperback's spine is similar: there are two identical but inverse Pantheon logos at each end, in between which are the pair of ISBN bar codes, and in between those is the title. With the blue cover up, the title is right side up, and the same goes for the red cover and the author's name - between the two is a blue line. In the title on the spine, the first "O" is the brownish purple of the red cover, the last is the bluish purple of the other cover, and the middle is green with two vertical lines in the center.

The inside flaps are identical in the following respects. Both list the price of the book in the US, Canada, and the UK. Both contain identical photographs of the author, below which appear identical author biographies. Both include a note from the publisher instructing the reader to alternate between Sam and Hailey (or "Hailey and Sam," depending on which flap you examine), reading eight pages at a time. Both contain identical credits for the author photograph, jacket design, and jacket photograph, and both contain the Pantheon logo and web addresses for Pantheon's website and the book's website. On the paperback, identical photographs and author descriptions are obtained, but on the blue cover's flap is a quote from the National Book Award Finalist Judge's Citation, and on the red cover's flap is a quote from the New York Times Book Review (which mentions that the book should be read 8 pages at a time, flipping it).

The blurbs that appear on the inside flaps differ slightly in character, though the structure of the sentences and paragraphs is nearly identical. In accordance with the general flavor of the two narratives, Sam's blurb (inside the green cover) is slightly darker in its imagery and word choice than Hailey's.