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Lolita (Amsterdam, 1978)

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This edition was published in 1978 in Amsterdam. First of all, what did the publisher change about the cover? We see a young woman, presumably Lolita, and a male figure, presumably Humbert, standing behind her, his upper body cut off from the picture. The broad feeling of the cover is rather sensual: Lolita is resting her head on Humbert’s hand, his other hand is holding hers, and Lolita’s gaze into the camera is definitely not just that of pure childlike innocence. In fact, it is quite obvious that the woman portraying Lolita is nowhere near 12 years old, which makes the cover visually a break from the story inside the book. Any controversy the story may arouse is hidden from its cover, as the child is replaced by a woman. Someone who might have never heard of Lolita, would perhaps take this book to be about a relationship between two adults. The imagery of the cover even resembles a genre of book the Dutch call “Bouquetreeks” (comparable to Harlequin Romance), in which typical love stories are told for the audience to dream away by. If anything, this specific edition does not arouse any controversy.

Who chose to depict Lolita this way? It surely was not Nabokov himself, or otherwise he would have had to approve hundreds of different editions, but rather the publisher. The front of the book is what sells, and from an entrepreneurial point of view, the publisher’s main goal is to sell books. So by presenting Lolita in this fashion, the publisher thought it was the best way to sell it to the public in The Netherlands during the late 1980’s. What can we learn from this? One way to look at it, is that both the publisher and the public of that time and place, belonging to the same culture, don’t view the story of Lolita as controversial at all: they don’t see the discrepancy in depicting a 12-year-old as a young woman. Another possibility is that Lolita did arouse controversy, but that the publisher intentionally kept this controversy away from the cover. The thinking might have been: controversy does not sell.