Monday 10 October 2011

White China

With china being the traditional 20th anniversary gift, British publishers Orion have decided to commemorate their two decades next year by commissioning sculptor Ben Twiston-Davies to create new sculptures representing 20 of their books; sculptures which have then been carefully photographed against white backgrounds and given minimalist text treatments. The results are quite lovely, as I hope you can see from the 10 covers I've scrounged together show.







I just wish that some of the books themselves were more deserving of this beautiful treatment. Orion may claim that "Award-winning, ground-breaking, genre-defining, blockbusting, [...] they’re the very best in publishing," but the likes of Dave Pelzer should be kept out of print, not celebrated. And the Horrid Henry cover looks unfortunately like this Tutis classic...


If Henry's doing what I think he's doing, then he really is horrid.

9 comments:

Missdisco said...

Sometimes I can see these series covers working, but largely I find them irritating, not only for the fact that they're a ploy to get you to buy all of them.

These ones I think especially don't work because these books aren't really connected to each other at all. They're not even in the same genre.

JRSM said...

It is a problem: the only real link is that they've all made money for Orion. In terms of quality they're all over the shop... I can't imagine anyone whose tastes would run to all 20. They're not an outfit like Penguin Classics, say, or even Faber, where you can imagine any 20 books chosen from the list might have more in common.

David Chute said...

"...the likes of Dave Pelzer should be kept out of print, not celebrated."

Gotta say why!

JRSM said...

Primarily because he doesn't write very well AND because he pretty much single-handedly spawned the huge misery memoir industry. See http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2008/10/abusing-abuse-industry.html for more on this commodification of child abuse.

Hoc hat Karaoke said...

i don't like china. Please keep us updated. David Mark.

hoc ke toan said...

I can't imagine anyone whose tastes would run to all 20

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gweenbrick said...

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mpk said...

That Tutis cover never fails to crack me up.