I bought my first copy of Jaws in our local bookshop some time in the autumn of 1975. It was a Pan paperback and, like most editions before and after, its cover image depicted a shark's head rearing up out of dark water towards the pale figure of a naked female swimmer executing a languorous crawl on the surface. Neither fish nor swimmer were depicted with great anatomical accuracy, and the shark's teeth, though ferocious, looked like those of Lon Chaney in London After Midnight.
Interestingly, the cover of the first US edition is even less realistic. The woman appears to be suspended in blackness above the rising phallic shape below her. Its mouth is a down-turned slit with no visible teeth. The UK's first hardcover edition of the book breaks with the tradition by showing a photo negative image of a Great White's open maw into which has been pasted the image of a sparsely populated beach, with a little boy - who could quite easily be Alex Kintner - waiting to be chewed up in the surf.
On the cover of the Pan paperback the novel's title was in a white jagged toothy-looking font, with the W in particular looking like the maw of a shark. Below that, in a smaller more standard typeface, was the tag line: "The spine-chilling bestseller ... one man against a giant killer shark and a town that won't face the truth!" Below that, the phrase that every popular author dreamed of: "Now a major film." On the back cover there was a quote from The Daily Express: "Pick up Jaws before midnight, read the first five pages, and I guarantee you'll be putting it down breathless and stunned, as dawn was breaking the next day."
