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 

Humiliating Henry James

I honestly thought I was done with Tutis: they haven't produced any new books in a while, at least not under that name, and I thought I'd pretty much plumbed the depths of their incompetence and derangement. But I was wrong, because I came across this cover...

The presence of the badly Photoshopped-in kitten made me think it must be a joke, but fortunately it's a real Tutis cover: better hurry, though, as Amazon only has one copy in stock!

Of course, once I'd fallen back into the sewers, I couldn't help fishing around to see what else I could find. Marvel at Tutis's intense campaign to humiliate Henry James.

I think there's a lesson here for all of us.

I've been trying to caption this for 10 minutes, but nothing I've come up with can match the sheer glory of this cover.

Indeed.

Henry James meets Red Dawn, coming soon from those tedious shitheads who brought you Pride & Prejudice & Zombies & Jane Eyre & Erotica & Vampires & Haemorrhoids

If you look at the original painting this is stolen from, you can see that someone has ineptly clone-tooled a bunch of goblins and trolls out of the picture. Lucky! Otherwise this would have been completely inappropriate.

When literalism attacks

I'm amazed this isn't just a big close-up of an eye, to be honest.

And to round things off, some other sublime Tutis work.

Rohmer based his Yellow Peril stereotypes on some incredibly wild misinformation

To be fair, Frankenstein does contain ice. And bipeds.

First, throw away your fish.

'Now, Timmy, people are going to tell you that lopped off arms will fling coins into piggybanks while travelling at speed down lonely country roads. I'm sorry to tell you that this just isn't true.'

Well, I admit to being pretty fucking mystified myself.

Tutis? Balls.

I had been intending to forswear any more Tutis-bashing, but a combination of technical and medical difficulties have prevented me getting the images I was going to write about. So here are some more cheap shots at the world's most incompetent "publisher" of classics.

One artist Tutis has regularly ripped off, using his images for their covers, no matter the inappropriateness, is Luis Royo. Now, I loathe Royo--his stock in trade is hideous softcore paintings of Gothy warrior women with few or no clothes, often humping demons or monsters of some kind or other, invariably with their mascara running. Here are the covers of several of his books, to show you what I mean (click for bigger, if you dare).

Anyway, Tutis seem to have decided he's worth plundering for their covers. In a rare display of restraint, however, they seem to have only used those of his paintings which feature fully dressed men, rather than masturbating sorceresses. And of course, nothing says 'Jack London' or 'Balzac' better than space warriors or wizards.

 

 

 

That last book is also available in another edition. In an inspired spirit of literary crossover, it features small metal models of the Mad Hatter's tea party from Alice in Wonderland.

 

That's not the only Tutis title to try this kind of literary mash-up: who knew that Dorothy of Oz had met Charlotte Brontë?

 

What remains mystifying--among many other things--is that they don't just slap any old image on the cover. Sometimes they go out of their way to change the picture to fit different books. Not in any way that actually fits what the book is about, but still...

 

Still, they do have another edition of Kipling's Kim, and at least that one has a cover which recognises that, at heart, it's just a simple story about multicoloured zombies with Walkmen.

 

The madness doesn't end there, inevitably. Here are some more uniquely interpreted classics, kicking off with an anti-slavery novel (with added gun-toting blindfolded ballet dancers), and proceding via a biography of Chopin (not the pianist, but the guitar-playing, jeans-wearing folksinger) and a pirates (on bicycles) adventure, to the previously undiscovered fact that America's presidents actually run the country from a secret base on Easter Island.

 

 

 

 

No Self-Control

I'm trying not to turn this blog into the Tutis "Appreciation" Society, but commenter Gareth pointed out something I can't resist re-posting. I quote him: "Anyone remember the joke where the doctor asks the man if his premature ejaculation has improved at all and the man replies 'No, it's still touch and go.' I only mention it because it appears to have influenced one of their D.H. Lawrence covers:



And an anonymous commenter also (mostly) solves the mystery of the pink thing from this post. "It's ... the character Sof' Boy in the comic by Archer Prewitt."




Sof' Boy is, and I quote from here, a "comic about a homeless, naive dough boy who happily lives in a crime- and filth-ridden urban neighborhood, surviving attacks by man and beast because he is made out of some kind of indestructible, infinitely elastic rubber." So it makes perfect sense to colour him pink and use him on the covers of classic novels.

Some more Tutis discoveries: another cover nicked from a Dungeons & Dragons novel, again with absolutely no regard for the contents of the book.




Speaking of Doyle, remember when he sent Sherlock Holmes off into space?



Lucky somebody else had already provided some art for just such a situation:



Of course, Arthur Conan Doyle wasn't the only writer to make unexpected ventures into the intergalactic.