Jilly Cooper's Riders: why the toned-down cover?

Small but ‘unsexy’ adjustment to the jacket art for a new edition of horsey bonkbuster has provoked a startlingly big fuss

Spot the difference ... the original cover for Jilly Cooper’s Riders (left) and the 30th anniversary redesign. Photograph: PR

Alison Flood

Wednesday 3 June 2015 - The Guardian 

There is a scandal going on in the world of books this week. And it’s not Philip Larkin’s distaste for literary parties, nor the depressing research showing that books about women are less likely to win literary prizes.

No. The Times, and the Daily Mail via the Times, inform us in no uncertain terms that the Issue of the Week is the slight change that has been made to the new cover of Jilly Cooper’s Riders.
Published 30 years ago, the novel was Cooper’s first “bonkbuster”. She’d already written a series of much shorter books focusing on one woman and her relationships, but this was her first proper doorstopper, tangling together the lives of a cast list that ran to pages. Set in the world of showjumping, and centring on the personal and professional life of the devastatingly good-looking but dastardly Rupert Campbell-Black and his rival Jake Lovell, it’s fair to say that Riders marked a step change in publishing.

Novels of this length, and containing this much sex, are everywhere these days. But back in the 1980s, it was largely just Jackie Collins, and Jilly. And it’s also fair to say that the novel’s cover - which, as the Times puts it, “featured a man’s hand resting intimately on the seat of a woman’s jodhpurs” - was something out of the ordinary for such a mainstream title. Just look where his fingers are straying.

Jilly Cooper. Photograph: JOHN WALTERS/REX FEATURES

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