Penguin & Not-Penguin

(Click for much bigger version)

Two covers of note today: the first is this marvellous design for one of my favourite novels, Kinglsey Amis's Lucky Jim, a new edition coming out from Penguin in April. It's by comics creator and illustrator Luke Pearson, and captures the characters and several of the situations (one a great dream of revenge). For more of Pearson's covers (for his comics), see the end of this post.

The other cover is for a self-published book by David Thorne, who I had not previously heard of (though his first book was published by Penguin). He has proudly posted a full cease-and-desist letter from the publisher on his site, commenting that it will make the first few copies of his book a collector's edition. You can see why Penguin might be worried--they have a sense of humour about their logo, but only when they're the ones doing the joking.

And now to those other Pearson covers...