Alternate Cover

The eyes are meant to represent how Octavian begins life under the watchful eyes of the Society. There is no face to go with the eyes because the Society uses numbers instead of names to identify each other, preventing the familiarity that comes from knowing someone's name. The scale is a tool used to balance the weight and value of one thing against another, and is a symbol of the repeated measurements the Society takes of Octavian. From the moment he's born, everything Octavian does is weight and measured. How well he can read, how tall he is, and even how much his excrement weighs. Every test is part of an extended experiment to see if an African can possibly be the equal of a white person. The body falling from the scale is Octavian, after the Pox Party, when he is no longer under the jurisdiction of the Society. The remaining value he has to the Society isn't related to the experiment anymore. Octavian goes through a period of letting time pass him by, taking what life throws at him, until he is trapped and then finally forced into the traditional role of a slave.

In the original cover, Octavian is shown wearing an iron mask and bit used to restrain slaves and prevent them from speaking or fighting back, muzzling them like a common animal. The simple cover shows that despite his beginnings as a seemingly equal being, in the end he is and has been nothing but a slave wearing a muzzle of one kind or another. Though effective, this simplicity fails to convey several important themes within the book. Our cover includes the cage to convey a similar meaning, but includes the scale and eyes because a very large element of the book involves evaluating and comparing the nature of black and white people.

The inner front flap shows a copy of a table shown within the book, detailing the taxonomy of primates. The most notable line of which comes at the end: "Homo sapiens - Know thyself" (45). This is one of the primary themes of the book; the reason Octavian exists within the Society. Placing the table at the very beginning on the inner flap provides a continued connection to the theme, as the inner flap is often used as a bookmark. The inner back flap simply presents a few blurbs or quotes, and the back has the summary and author's biography.

An alternate presentation could be to swtich the table to the back cover, and put the summary and author's biography on the inner front flap instead, allowing for a more direct connection to the cover.