Ancient North: New & Improved

As a follow-up to yesterday's posting of the Penguin Legends of the Ancient North covers, here they are in their final, high-resolution versions: please click for nice big versions. They are the work of Petra Borner (previously discussed here and here), and were  made of layered papercuts at a startling A2 scale. As for the stickers mentioned in that last post, Penguin's art editor, Isabelle De Cat, is very reassuring: "it does peel off, and it does peel off super-neatly: I made absolutely sure of that. I’ve been testing all the stickers the production controller could source until we found the perfect thing that will not damage the covers." So I'll be buying all five, then! (And for more amazing papercut illustrations, see this old post...)

David Pearson's New Classics

The inestimable Will of A Journey Round My Skull kindly pointed me in the direction of a new publishing venture co-headed by David Pearson, often discussed on this blog. It's called White's Books, and the idea behind it is to produce beautiful hardback editions of established classics. Pearson does the typesetting himself, and invites some of his favourite designers to do the covers and endpapers. An interview at the 'Creative Review' blog discusses the ideas behind the range and the designs in more depth, so here we'll just gawk at the books.

First, here's Pearson's own cover for Shakespeare's collected poetry.



Here is Petra Börner's Jane Eyre. Börner was discussed on this blog earlier on here.



This is Stanley Donwood's Treasure Island, a lithographic print similar to his huge 'London Views' work detailing the destruction of England's capital by flood and fire. Some of you may also know Donwood through his design work for Radiohead.



The last of the initial White's offerings is Joe McLaren on Dickens.

15 Perennials

I recently bought a couple of novels with rather nice covers: Ballard's Empire of the Sun and Susan Fletcher's Eve Green.


They're excellent examples of the effectiveness of black-and-white illustration, in each case highlighted with a patch of metallic ink.

What I didn't know until I got the books and looked at the back is that they're part of a series of 15 reissues by Harper Perennial UK, all with covers by Petra Borner. What's more the 15 covers, when placed side-by-side, create one large illustration. You'll need to click for a proper look.


This is a great idea, and a good way to unify a series that otherwise seems fairly arbitrary in terms of the books included.

Here are the spines, showing the metallic inks to better effect.

Petra Borner has done a number of other lovely book covers, shown at her portfolio linked to above. I can't display them all here, but I couldn't resist those she did for the recent Penguin Poets series. Again, click for a bigger version.