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.
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9 comments:

  1. Missdisco11 October 2011 at 11:59

    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.

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  2. JRSM11 October 2011 at 16:23

    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.

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  3. David Chute12 October 2011 at 12:33

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

    Gotta say why!

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  4. JRSM12 October 2011 at 14:29

    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.

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  5. Hoc hat Karaoke14 October 2011 at 00:28

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

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  6. hoc ke toan14 October 2011 at 00:30

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

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  7. Navid14 October 2011 at 02:25

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    world Entertainment

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  8. gweenbrick14 October 2011 at 09:16

    Just found you and really enjoy it. Very unique topic!

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  9. mpk16 October 2011 at 08:29

    That Tutis cover never fails to crack me up.

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