Crapping Out Classics

A quick round-up of recent developments in the world of hideous public-domain publishing...

Item 1: This splendid edition of the Bible from our old friends at Vexin Classics, which in no way confuses belief systems:

Item 2: Some delightful editions of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the cover designs of which shows all the subtlety and wit we've come to expect from the cheaparse cash-in merchants who populate Amazon's sewage-choked ebook library:

That last version claims to be "illustrated" by Zooey Hawkins. And it is, if by "illustrated" you mean "Photoshop filter run hastily over stolen promotional images from the recent movie adaptation".

Item 3: Further Pride and Prejudice investigations lead us to the nameless outfit responsible for these delights...

If the covers are any guide, the images in these "Color Illustrated" books should be very helpful indeed.

Item 4: The next stage on this short tour of hell is the strange world of Ronn Says, an Indian writer who "writes about various genres, and believes in spreading his experiences through his books. But primarily his genre is full fledged Romantic Novels. He is much acclaimed for his books". And you can see why, when they look like this...

..but he also dabbles in publishing the classics, with stolen movie posters on the covers, with these results...

Jane "Stone Cold" Austin

(One good thing about all this copyright theft from movies is that it adds several more books to the Keira Knightley Library of World Literature.)

..though he sometimes steers away from movies in order to experiment with era-appropriate stock photos...

..which leads us finally to Item 5: Further anachronistic up-fucking of Stephen Crane's US Civil War classic...

"Special" as in "special education class", I assume

Antietam, Vietnam, it's all the fucking same, right?

The War Between the States and the Arctic Centurions

Napoleonic Hussars devastated large swathes of Atlanta 

Fluffy

Here's an inspired approach to creating a limited-edition version of a book. Commendably angry publishers OR Books recently published a collection of noted awful film-maker Ed Wood's pulp short stories, Blood Spatters Quickly.

 

Among many other notable traits, Wood was also a cross-dresser, particularly obsessed with wearing fluffy pink angora jumpers (or 'sweaters', for the Americans in the audience)--see his early movie Glen or Glenda, which heavily fictionalised his own experiences and in which he played the lead...

..and so it's rather wonderful that the special edition of this book comes with its own fluffy pink jumper.

What are the stories like? Pretty much as you might imagine, only even more mad and padded and inept. As an example, the opener, Scream Your Bloody Head Off, which is accompanied by this entirely apt bit of artwork...

..begins like this:

'She was going to send him to the cemetery. He knew that from the moment he saw her flying at him, that knife gleaming over her head.

'It was bitter cold and the blizzard had been grinding across the land for more than two days and there didn’t appear to be any letting up and Stella, Johnnie’s wife, lay dead on the kitchen floor… right where she had fallen dead from the butcher knife wound in her heart – the night the storm had started.

'Sure, Johnnie had screwed the neighbor broad right through. Stella had been so right about that. But he couldn’t figure why she came charging at him with that foot-long butcher knife. She had flown across the kitchen floor at him screaming her bloody head off… screaming like a wounded eagle. She was screaming as if all the devils of hell, the creatures from the grave, had entered her very being. It was not even her own voice. She had screamed at him before… many times before… but there was never the sound of panic, despair, horror in those tones… if the sounds could even be called tones.

'All he remembered about that moment, except the terrifying utterances that gaping mouth made, was that gleaming butcher knife, raised so high above her head and it was coming in his direction… the high-pitched scream… the gaping mouth… the saliva-dripping tongue and lips… the red… bloodshot red eyes which suddenly seemed to have no eyelids… simply blood-red eyes in dark sockets… never blinking…and that black negligee trailing out behind her like sheer bat wings on a heavy breeze.'

The Horror! The Horror! (2)

Continuing the seasonally inappropriate horror covers theme, take a look at these bloodsuckers. After their 20th-anniversary special editions last year, BFI have chosen another bunch of their Film Classics books to prettify: books on some of the great Gothic/horror movies. The results are gorgeous, and often unexpected--there's not a splash of blood in sight.

(Note: there are two Nosferatus here: both the 1922 and 1979 versions have books dedicated to them.)

Design by Mark Swan

Design by Matt Brand (this is the 1979 Herzog version)

Design by Matthew Young

Design by Midge Naylor

Design by Santiago Caruso

Design by Ben Goodman

Design by Graham Humphreys (and for one of my favourite films)

Design by Julia Soboleva (this is the 1922 original Nosferatu)

More on the series, with comments from the designers, here.

Father Brown, Ancient North

A brief post showing off two new series coming from Penguin Classics UK at the end of the year: first of all, the five books in the 'Legends from the Ancient North' series:

 

These are really nice, with an air of olden-days Penguins to them. I just hope that this bit...

 ..is a sticker, or else you'll be permanently stuck with that unfortunate link to the middle bits of the most drawn-out case of milking it in cinematic history.

The other series are these elegant new editions of the G. K. Chesterton Father Brown books:

 

These take inspiration from Romek Marber's old Penguin Chesterton crime covers, especially in the case of 'The Incredulity...' (old) in 'The Innocence...' (new):

Spines, Legs, Horrible Films, Cigarettes

A book coming out in January, that appears to be a satire on creative writing classes, with a rather nifty cover:

Interestingly, though the book is published by Cape, part of Vintage UK, it actually calls back to the once-characteristic plain white spines of old Picador paperbacks.

First Novel is not the first book by that title. In 1999 Harvill published a book by the same name written by Mazarine Pingeot, the "secret daughter" of arch-shit and former French president François Mitterand. The book was no good, and was seemingly only published because she was the "secret daughter" of arch-shit and former French president François Mitterand, and piles of this book could be found in remainder bookshops for years afterwards.

It uses a well-known photo, 'Sense' by Tono Stano, that was later bought and fucked with by MGM to become the poster for the famously crap film 'Showgirls'.

And just so that, if I get hit by a bus later today, that's not the last image I ever post, here's a cover design from Picador a couple of years ago that I somehow missed when it came out: the clever cigarette-pack packaging of Stuart Evers's Ten Stories About Smoking.