Illustrated Man Illustrated

Sorry about the week-long gap--I've been busy with real-world stuff, as well as being disappointed with Prometheus. Today I see that Ray Bradbury has died. Now I'm (whispers) not the biggest Bradbury fan, though he seems to have been a lovely chap. His writing has lots of good ideas, but its sentimental folksiness grates a bit on me. However, this seems as good a time as ever to post these covers I discovered a couple of weeks ago: three designs by Adam Johnson for the Harper Perennial Modern Classics editions of three of his best books. Click for bigger versions.

We've seen Johnson's work round these parts before: see his beautiful paper stand-ups photos for a number of classic short story selections.

Shorts

The alleged unsaleability of short story collections is much remarked upon (I don't know what they mean: I buy enough of these books to keep a small national economy afloat), so I assume that the logic behind this attractive series of books from Harper Perennial US is to lure people towards new writers via a known quantity.

Each of these six 250-odd-page collections features a bunch of short stories from the author on the cover, along with a bonus story from a contemporary writer with a collection in-print with Perennial. I have mixed feelings about the idea, but the execution of the cover designs is both simple and elegant.








Anything which gets the short fiction of Crane and Cather into wider hands is OK by me (the others too, but I suspect they need less of a push).

I'm not sure who to credit for these covers, but they're really nice. I think (and hope) that they're photos of little cardboard stand-ups, rather than being computer-generated, but either way they're nifty.

UPDATE: Helpful commenter BKLYNmle tells me that these covers are the work of Adam Johnson. And they are photographs of real paper cutouts. Huzzah! The spines also fit together to make a single image...