As I mentioned in my
introduction to my Wilkie Collins cover design series, Collin's work is full of dualities, doubles and doppelgängers. In my covers for his major novels—
The Woman in White, for example—I echoed that theme in the motif of the twin but reversed magnifying glasses and the mirror images of the backgrounds. For Collins' lesser fiction, I played with visual doubling without using any illustrative images. Here, the busy design, corner dingbat from the period and two typefaces (Bernier and Sancreek) that suggest the era's display fonts give the covers a Victorian inflection while the flat black background helps keep the overall look contemporary.
