As you can probably already guess, the story of what inspired this survey is fairly simple: I was looking around in the local bookstore today, and saw that the Dutch publishing company Luitingh, easily the biggest speculative fiction publishers in the Dutch language, had released a number of Neil Gaiman's novels in a new Dutch-language edition, with new titles and matching covers. So I took a closer look at one of these new books, and discovered that the cover blurb describes Gaiman as an "American top author". Hoping against hope that maybe it was just on that particular book's blurb, I checked the other books in the series, but nope, it was on all of them. Good job, Luitingh.

And then to add insult to injury, as I went looking on the Luitingh website to see if maybe there was a correction somewhere, for the sake of not needlessly ruining their reputation and all, I came across a (translated) interview with Neil Gaiman, in which he was quoted as saying "Read the Narnia-series by T.W. White and you know my roots". Now, seeing how I have enough confidence in Gaiman to be certain he wouldn't make a gaffe of such proportions, I can only conclude it's Luitingh's fault once more. Shame on them.

So, the survey part, well, it's all in the post title already, really. Any amusing or painful gaffes, horrid grammar or spelling errors, and so on that you came across on book covers from publishers who really should know better? Or from authors themselves, of course, though then you could argue it's still the publisher who's to blame for not catching it.