Tutis? Balls.

I had been intending to forswear any more Tutis-bashing, but a combination of technical and medical difficulties have prevented me getting the images I was going to write about. So here are some more cheap shots at the world's most incompetent "publisher" of classics.

One artist Tutis has regularly ripped off, using his images for their covers, no matter the inappropriateness, is Luis Royo. Now, I loathe Royo--his stock in trade is hideous softcore paintings of Gothy warrior women with few or no clothes, often humping demons or monsters of some kind or other, invariably with their mascara running. Here are the covers of several of his books, to show you what I mean (click for bigger, if you dare).

Anyway, Tutis seem to have decided he's worth plundering for their covers. In a rare display of restraint, however, they seem to have only used those of his paintings which feature fully dressed men, rather than masturbating sorceresses. And of course, nothing says 'Jack London' or 'Balzac' better than space warriors or wizards.

 

 

 

That last book is also available in another edition. In an inspired spirit of literary crossover, it features small metal models of the Mad Hatter's tea party from Alice in Wonderland.

 

That's not the only Tutis title to try this kind of literary mash-up: who knew that Dorothy of Oz had met Charlotte Brontë?

 

What remains mystifying--among many other things--is that they don't just slap any old image on the cover. Sometimes they go out of their way to change the picture to fit different books. Not in any way that actually fits what the book is about, but still...

 

Still, they do have another edition of Kipling's Kim, and at least that one has a cover which recognises that, at heart, it's just a simple story about multicoloured zombies with Walkmen.

 

The madness doesn't end there, inevitably. Here are some more uniquely interpreted classics, kicking off with an anti-slavery novel (with added gun-toting blindfolded ballet dancers), and proceding via a biography of Chopin (not the pianist, but the guitar-playing, jeans-wearing folksinger) and a pirates (on bicycles) adventure, to the previously undiscovered fact that America's presidents actually run the country from a secret base on Easter Island.