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.

Quentin Blake Addendum

Can't believe I forgot this one: the current Penguin cover to Evelyn Waugh's darkly brilliant The Loved One is by Quentin Blake.

Quentin Blake's Other Covers

Quentin Blake, born 1932, is deservedly well-known for his wonderful illustrations to his own and others' children's books: Roald Dahl, Russel Hoban, William Steig, Joan Aiken, JP Martin's Uncle books, and the wonderful Beatrice and Vanessa by John Yeoman, to name a few.

What is less known is his extensive background in providing covers for adult books, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Usually using monochrome or limited colour schemes, his sketchy, appealing cartoons adorned a huge number of works.

Here, for example, are some of his Penguin covers for Evelyn Waugh (as always, click on the images for more detail)...




..and for Kingsley Amis (including Lucky Jim, one of my favourite books ever, so good it made the rest of Amis's fiction a significant disappointment)...



..as well as hardback dustjackets for Margaret Drabble...



..and lovely covers for the Folio Society editions of Orwell's Animal Farm, Gibbons's Cold Fomfort Farm, and Cervantes' Don Quixote.



Here are more of his numerous covers.