Repackaging Fitzgerald

Penguin repackages F Scott Fitzgerald at an ever-increasing rate. Coming in October are six of his books as a set of hardcovers, with subdued era-appropriate dustjackets. I don't have the designer information as yet. What do you think?

UPDATE: The designer is the brilliant Coralie Bickford-Smith, who I interviewed here. The covers will be printed on metal foil, giving them a gorgeous 1920s Art Deco look. Beautiful!

For comparison, here are the first of Vintage US's Fitzgerald reissues.

Pretty Comics

Just a bunch of comics covers, of books to be released this year, inspired by these beauties from Eddie Campbell...

..and Jason.

As I've said before, graphic novel cover design is unusual, in that the creators of the book more often than not get to design the book, too: many writers of pure text would wish they could do the same, I'm sure.

Here are some more that caught my eye.

The titleless cover with the skull and the White House is Mike Huddlestone's The Homeland Directive.

...and speaking of Borges

Following on from yesterday's Borges covers, here's a collection of his writings in the upcoming fifth set of Penguin Great Ideas.

And here's another from the series, Charles Baudelaire.

Ben Wiseman on Borges

When I was a child I was obsessed with monsters, an obsession fuelled by avid watching of Doctor Who and various child-friendly versions of the Greek myths. My Bible at the time was the Usborne Book of Monsters. And then, when I was about 12 or so, a great-uncle gave me a copy of Jorge Luis Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, with Peter Goodfellow's Bosch-y cover painting. It blew my tiny mind, because it wasn't just an encyclopaedia of monsters, but was funny and clever and inventive at the same time--a collection of stories disguised as a reference book. It got me hooked on Borges well before I could understand more than a fraction of what he wrote about.

Cut to last week, when I got copies of two collections of Borges' poetry: Poems of the Night and The Sonnets. They're beautiful collections, made even more so by the covers designed by Ben Wiseman.

Three collections of Borges' essays are also due soon from Penguin, with more Wiseman covers.

Wiseman has produced a number of other great covers for a variety of publishers. Here are some of my favourites, starting with three elegant Chekhovs.

Hesperus Brief Histories

Four books due out from Hesperus in the middle of the year (which probably means we'll see them some time in 2012, given Hesperus's recent track record*) are their Brief Histories of various forms of literature. Every cover is made up of a shelf of relevant books, but every book is both a fake and a pun (and there's a nice range of fake publishing imprints in there, too).

Among Hesperus's other allegedly forthcoming titles, I especially like this cover.

* I have about a dozen Hesperus titles on order, most of them scheduled to have come out in late 2008 or during 2009, and none of them yet to see print. They do great books, but you do have to wait a bit to read them.

Comic Classics

There has been a long tradition of comic versions of classic literature: the Classics Illustrated series began in 1941, and ran for 30 years, for example. I have read very few such adaptations, but have nothing against them in principle: a comic version is like a film version--almost certain to be inferior, but with the potential to do some things visually in a way that text on a page cannot. Because of this, I was interested to come across the publications of Selfmadehero, a company dedicated to comic adaptations of classic fiction, crime fiction, and Shakespeare (see below).

I'm posting the covers of their classic adaptations here because it's interesting to see these visual approaches to great works.

I have to say that I'm tempted to see what Andrzej Klimowski makes of Robert Louis Stevenson, and Martin Rowson seems a natural fit for Tristram Shandy. I do have an older graphic novel by Rowson, who is most famous as an incredibly savage political cartoonist: it's a weird book that recasts T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as a detective story.

Among other books, he's also done a cartoon history of the universe, entitled Fuck: The Human Odyssey.

Selfmadehero's Shakespeares, by the way, are all done in manga style: