Puffin Magic II

Having very much enjoyed Puffin by Design (see here), I am very keen to see, in physical form, these upcoming Puffin Designer Classics, released to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the children's publishing imprint. These six books, each designed by major artists,architects and designers, are rather beautiful. The only downside is that, at the price of £100, and as limited editions, you wouldn't dare let kids anywhere near them.

They are:

Little Women by fashion designer Orla Kiely,

Oliver Twist by artist Sir Peter Blake (see more of his cover work here),

  
Treasure Island by architect and sculptor Frank Gehry,

 and my favourites, Around the World in Eighty Days by architect David Adjaye,

James and the Giant Peach by sculptor Antony Gormley,

and The Secret Garden by author and illustrator Lauren Child (a really nice use of layers here, though presumably this will make the book fairly fragile). Says she: "I thought it would be interesting to do a cover where one could peel back the paper layers, one by one until the garden and the girl are revealed - it was just a nice way to conjure the secretness of the garden."

(Click for much bigger images)

Puffins! Part 2

Earlier this year, we looked at the first nine Puffin Classics: a very attractive series of great children's books, with funky new covers by some top children's illustrators.

Now there are another nine in the series, and again they look very nice indeed. Here's the great Edith Nesbit's Five Children and It, starring the gloriously ill-tempered Psammead, with a Quentin Blake cover.



Chris Riddell returns with another cover, this time for Peter Pan.



Lauren Child, of the Clarice Bean books, provides the cover for Anne of Green Gables, by recently-revealed-as-a-drug-induced-suicide L. M. Montgomerey.



Here are the others in the series: it's also pleasant to see that the books by authors with others in the series have covers by the same (unknown to me) artists, as with Dickens, Twain and London.








Again, I like the way that on some of the covers, the illustration is allowed to encroach onto the normally sacrosanct white Penguin Classics band.