So it was a positive pleasure to come across the redesign of their Shakespeare series. In a style reminiscent of Melville House's Neversink Library (single-colour background, well-chosen silhouettes), they also deploy well-chosen quotes from the plays in nice, big text. The design work is by Michel Vrana (who also did the Thomas Berger covers in this post)..
The choice of silhouettes that that are metaphorical (lion) or even jokey (the pursuing bear) add to the cleverness.
3 comments:
One of my rules of thumb is that if I see a Broadview in used bookstores, I buy them no matter what. They're super expensive and hard to come by. They're also tremendously well edited and compiled. Often, the texts include copious amounts of essays, articles, and supplementary material. Very handy for the scholar. But yes, boy are they boring fussy covers.
I've done the same, even buying books I already owned because the Broadview versions had such interesting extra stuff included. But I keep my other versions because they invariably look much nicer.
I do the very same for the very same reasons. The 2005 Broadview edition of Sara Jeannette Duncan's The Imperialist is one of three I own - on par with the excellent 1996 Tecumseh Press edition.
The only disappointment to date comes with The Typewriter Girl by Grant Allan (aka Olive Pratt Rayner), which contains a good introduction by but nothing whatsoever in the way of supplementary material. Don't know what went on there.
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