Over at the blog of the otherwise admirable Australian Book Designers Association, I am doing my party piece.

Australian Bigots Are Also Dishonest, Who Knew?

In Australia one of the current favourite targets for bigots, scumbags, libertarians and other assorted Trump-emboldened shitheads is section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, which makes unlawful any act reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or group of people because of their race, colour, nationality or ethnicity. There's a push, which our Prime Minister (a weak-kneed and utterly pointless shell of a man who has mastered the lawyer's art of believing and orating pompously about whatever he has been paid to believe) now supports, to have it removed from the nation's laws.

Yesterday I saw this book, No Offence Intended: Why 18c Is Wrong, published by local right-wing dipshit press Connor Court, and the total dishonesty and speciousness of its cover really riled me up.

It's not young Asian women who are being "censored" by 18C. It's invariably the sort of white men who want to deport Muslims and abolish feminism, and who are terrified of the reality of a world that doesn't all look exactly like themselves, and whose frothing rabid hate speech hasn't exactly been curtailed by this law they claim to be so restrictive. Until 11 September 2001, these turds were shitting on Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants (when they weren't taking sex tours to Thailand). Now they pretend that these victims of theirs are the ones being oppressed, and that they are bravely defending their freedoms. To which we can only respond with a hearty Go fuck yourselves!.

An Alternative History of Literature, as Interpreted by HMDS Printing

At the risk of turning this sporadically updated blog into nothing but a repository for the worst bowel movements of the public domain-scraping automated ebook industry, let's imagine the alternative history of literature suggested by the covers of the classics published by "HMDS Printing...

Alcott's classic tale of cloned urban feminist Leninists

To be fair, you can almost see Fanny.

The beloved novella of American Civil War Primal Scream training

A portrait entitled 'Man in a Hat that Makes Him look Retarded'

Prince Lyov Nikolaevich Myshkin vomited on his shirt and then sucked a lemon to take away the aftertaste. 'Who's an idiot now?" he asked, smugly.

No, Vietnam is on the other side of paradise.

This is actually the cover for the book The Brothers Shaw

No trainer wheels? That IS adventurous!

Australia, Japan, it's all the same, who gives a fuck?

Everyone always wondered how he would end this novel. Nobody thought of the answer 'pretentious woman goes topless with a rug on her head'.

Cormac McCarthy's first draft of The Road was much less effective when every reference to "the father" was written as "Dombey".

The big red A stands for Absolut

How evolution led to cavemen inventing the toilet roll

Bimbo and Bicycle

When Heathcliff dug up his Cathy's body, he was in for a surprise

The Black Arrow. The One-Cup Bra. The Bow Made of Lobsters.

Long John Silver always found it annoying that people refused to believe the story of how he lost his leg.

I just, I mean, what the fuck, I don't know

Anna was winner of series 3 of Real Housewives of St Petersburg

Nothing wrong here, this is a perfect reasonable cover

[Shoots self in head]

[Collapses bleeding on floor]

[Bleeds out]

[All is silence, and blessed peace at last]

Monkeys Throwing Faeces

A regular feature on this site used to be the mocking of the latest covers from Tutis, clueless pumpers-out of public domain books with wildly inappropriate covers (start here, get the whole horror show in these posts). But, sadly, their utter incompetence seems to have contributed to them going out of business, and for a long time the world of book design was a colder, darker, less colourful place.

But this morning my attention was drawn towards a new land of delights: the catalogue of Read Monkey, via this delightful cover, which suggests Dostoyevsky's grim classic is the tale of a couple of knockabout, clean-cut Irish lads getting up to a few harmless japes.

Aww, bless.

You might think this is as off-key as a cover could get. You would be wrong. Behold, Read Monkey's finest...

I would put mocking captions to these, but it's just redundant. I like that, though some covers (like The Lost World) bear some relationship to their contents (though with completely the wrong tone), and with some (like Life on the Mississippi) you can sort of reconstruct the "thought" processes that lead to them, others (like The Return of the Native) defy any sort of explanation. And the Captain America version of Thoreu, along with the rest of these, just made me think of this classic comic frame...