Penguin vs Peter Owen

I'm not sure what exactly has gone on behind the scenes, but a number of books long published, championed and supported by Peter Owen in their Modern Classics series seem to be slipping over, in paperback editions, to Penguin Modern Classics, with some very nice covers. However, Peter Owen seems to have retained the hardback rights, and are reprinting them as what they are calling Cased Classics. (See other examples of paperbacks at one publisher, hardbacks with another here and here.)

So here are the new/imminent Penguins...

..and here are the beautiful hardback Peter Owens, with diecut covers over fully illustrated boards (click for much bigger versions).

The moral of this story is that the much less attractive edition of The Ice Palace which I bought a couple of months ago, before I knew about any of these, was not a good investment.

(More Peter Owen coming soon: their beautiful and intriguing World Series books with Istros)

Queued Penguins

Perving at the upcoming Penguin Classics has revealed a bunch of things I will need to spend money on, and a few things worthy of comment here. First of all, an apparently random trio of upcoming titles have a completely new series design, for no reason I can yet determine. I like it, but don't understand what's happening.

 

  

 

There's also a welcome addition of more weird/horror fiction to the line, both American and Filipino.

 

We also have another ofBassani's Romanzo di Ferrara books, getting us closer to having the whole cycle in print in English...

 

..and using a cover image last seen on the late, lamented Harvill edition of Erwin Mortier's My Fellow Skin.

And then we have Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, which is a welcome addition to the library of books featuring Josephine Baker on the cover.

Here are some of the other upcoming offerings worth your consideration.

Lust, Madness, Cruelty, Deception; but enough about me

>Blows dust off surfaces, has coughing fit, sits down for a bit.<

Ahem. Sorry about the long delay. Let's get back into it, shall we?

Penguin's latest reshuffling and rebadging of Roald Dahl's adult short stories is a nice set of four themed collections, each with a newly commissioned painting from Charming Baker. I must admit that I've never really enjoyed these stories much; Dahl seems too contemptuous of his characters and too much of a reveller in the cruelties he creates for them to sit well with me. But the best of them are still worth reading, and with these covers they're unlikely to look prettier. Click to embiggen.

I also have a fondness for the creepy Penguin Modern Classics versions of several Dahl books, though the two story collections here are already out of print due to the constant reshuffling/rebadging mentioned above...

Of course, if you want some unreservedly excellent creepy short stories, can I direct you to these Shirley Jackson collections, each of which is irritatingly much more attractive than the editions I own?

A couple of other Penguin takes on Dahl are here...

Nice New Covers for Ridiculous Tone-Deaf Bigot

Penguin is pushing out some nicely restrained covers for a couple of Richard Dawkins's books on their various anniversaries.

Given his horrible online presence (see here and here for summaries) where he attacks children interested in science because they have brown skin, tells people to abort their babies, and retweets white supremacist propaganda, might I suggest Penguin add this title to their list?

Now that's odd

I was looking at the covers of the Chinese- and Spanish-language Penguin Classics for an upcoming post comparing how these books are presented for different audiences by the same publisher, when I noticed something odd. I'm not saying anything fishy happened here--Penguin are big and conscientious enough to pay for their cover art--bit it was quite strange to see this specially designed cover, by Hannah Naughton, for the excellent And Other Stories translation of Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel's By Night the Mountain Burns...

..turn up repurposed for the Spanish Penguin Classics edition of The Iliad.

You get used to seeing this sort of thing with famous or public domain artwork, but this is the first time I think I've come across a specific book design being reused for an utterly unrelated book.

Lesbian Flowers

Vintage Classics has an edition of Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle coming out soon--one of the first lesbian novels that was frequently funny and joyful, rather than a Radclyffe Hall-style doomfest--and while the cover image is in itself rather beautiful (a photo by Mark Vessey), as a choice of image it feels stale: blossoming flower as a stand-in for blossoming female sexuality is an old, old trope.

This is one of those occasions in which the Vintage Classics author formula of 'VINTAGE [SURNAME]' doesn't work: 'Vintage Brown' sounds like the description of a wallpaper you'd rip down as fast as possible upon buying a house last redecorated in 1978.

It does, however, reference the various, rather dull, US covers that many of the books original readers would recognise (image stolen from here):

Much better, to my mind, is this old Penguin Essentials cover from 2001:

The title and author were listed on a removable sticker used in most bookshops to cover the more prominent nipples

Of course, if it's explicitness you're after, you could always try this Italian edition...

Fluorescent Cats

You wait for years for a book cover featuring fluorescent green cats, and then two come along at once:

Penguin Australia, early 2014

Bloodaxe, UK, late 2014

Both make use of the startling 'Radioactive Cats' by Sandy Skoglund, from as long ago as 1980. In fact, it has cropped up on a few other books, in various languages, before..

Skoglund's amazing life-size diorama photos are quite eye-popping.Here are some others, with more to be found here. (Click for biggenification.)