I choose to believe that somewhere out there there’s a freelance book designer on a mission. Their goal is to fight the homogeneity of modern cover design, and roll back the oppression forced upon them by the Big Publishers.
But you can’t slip an act of rebellion past just any old client. You have to pick your moment and find one so incompetent that they’ve never looked at a bookshelf before.
(I had a look at my bookshelf at home, and the only two books that do this are French and Spanish. Is this a foreign thing?)