Bondage Manga Wodehouse & Stolen Cover Art

Yet another case of public-domain PG Wodehouse being debased by random ebook sellers, this time one Sheba Blake Publishing...

..who also sells another Wodehouse short story using artwork stolen from the cover Norton's edition, by Antony Hare. The Norton edition looks like this...

..and the Sheba Blake version like this...

In fact, a quick look at the Sheba Blake website reveals a vast array of stolen covers, many from Vintage UK and Penguin. Cunningly, those stolen from Vintage still retain the 'Vintage' branding...

Penguin Frome and Vintage Mirth

Vintage Rudge and Dombey, and that Hunted Down cover is from Peter Owen

..and I'm sure that all of these other covers could be found to have been stolen too, with a bit more Googling.

Essential Penguins Return

Every now and then Penguin fire out a burst of Essentials, a series that usually consists of books from the Modern Classics line, rebranded as smaller paperbacks with eye-catching covers. The thinking is that these will appeal to the sort of people who would not pick up a classic. Who are these mad people? Can we give them a good pummeling?

After a long period of quiet, a new batch of 10 have just been released, with cover designs by a range of contemporary artists. Click for bigger versions.

Design by Joe Cruz

A typically violent Cleon Peterson design

One of my favourites in this series, by JP King

Design by Camilla Perkins; I'm not sure that this quite hits the spot: see this post for numerous other takes on the Triffid

Design by Mr Foxx

Another favourite, by Australian typographer and illustrator Georgia Hill: she painted the lettering on glass and then took a hammer to it for the final photograph 

The third of my favourites, a creepy work by Karl Kwasny

Design by illustrator and comics artist Jon McNaught

Design by illustrator and children's book artist Carson Ellis

Design by Emily Sutton

Why they Burned Down the Library of Alexandria

Another competitor for the late lamented Tutis: The Library of Alexandria, whose reassuring web presence consists of a Facebook page full of unsolicited legal advice. Unlike Tutis, who stole their wildly inappropriate cover images from anywhere, The Library of Alexandria mostly stick to paintings in the public domain. Fortunately for our purposes, they are choosing the images based on no sane basis.

Here's their unique approach to P. G. Wodehouse...

Mark Twain...

F. Scott Fitzgerald...

The hidden side of Antarctica...

And their strange takes on some other literary classics (the unconventional cropping is their own work)...