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.

Pulp Shenanigans

Here's another of those duplicated cover images, with both places being collections of old pulp crime stories. Presumably it's been on at least 3 covers, since somewhere there's an old magazine that was its original appearance.



While we're on the subject of anthologies of old pulp stories, here's one of the most unfortunate book titles ever:



If only this was in print still; you could go up to your bookshop counter and ask for hard-boiled dicks, and mean it. This book is not to be confused with The New Hard-Boiled Dicks: A personal checklist, which is a completely different book with an equally amusing title.

John Wyndham Follow-Up

In my internet fartings-about since I posted a huge heap of John Wyndham covers, I've come across a few more, including some non-English editions. So, without further ado, here they are:

Another Penguin cover, by Herbert Spencer:








This Penguin cover was by Paul Hogarth:






One thing I did not mention in that last post, but which I ought to say, is that several of the books featured here and in that last post--The Secret People, Sleepers of Mars and Wanderers of Time--are early magazine pulp works that Wyndham himself mostly disowned, and should be approached with great caution. The rest of his stuff is ace, though.

John Christopher update

Another quickie, this time updating the posts about the great literary catastrophist John Christopher. I came across a new-to-me blog, Bookride, about collecting/buying/selling rare books, and they had a post on the first edition of Christopher's The Death of Grass, showing the original UK jacket by Trevor Denning (click for much bigger version).



I am also reliably informed by a Man Who Knows that this excellent book is to appear as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2009. Huzzah!

While we're here, have a couple more Trevor Denning covers:

Retitled

Just a quick one here, about a book I'd heard of but dismissed as being the literary equivalent of those "funny" little books you see at chainstore bookshop checkout counters--

However, a rave review from the entertaining and reliable Nicholas Lezard has made me reconsider, and I'm glad I did, because I saw the new paperback edition's cover:


I really like this: the determination to carefully Photoshop-match the "original" titles with the original fonts on the old paperbacks and hardbacks shows an admirable dedication. I also just like books about books with lots of books on the front (the subject for an upcoming post, by the way).

It also pisses all over the dull-as-dust hardback cover for the same book:

Wild Harbour

Here we return to apocalypses, and we're looking at one of my favourite books, which is also one of the saddest books I've read (see also Boy).

The book is Ian Macpherson's Wild Harbour, first published in 1936. The edition I have is the 1996 Canongate Classics version: part of a series of works of great Scottish literature that also includes another book with one of my favourite titles, Elspeth Davie's The Man Who Wanted To Smell Books.



This appropriately fraught cover painting is actually a self-portrait by Alan Stones.



Here are three of his other paintings: ''Stories' - Clearing' (which, whatever it actually does show, immediately suggests to me two forestry workers who've stumbled on a corpse)...


..'Captive'...


..and 'Immediate Family'.


What about the book itself? It's short, written with deceptive simplicity, and quite heartbreaking. It is set in a near future of universal war, including biological and chemical weapons, but the action takes place in the undeveloped Scottish hills, away from society and technology, giving it a feel that it could be happening at almost any time in the last few hundred years.

The main characters are a married couple, pacifists, who flee "civilisation" and its violent collapse, seeking a new life in the wilderness. It is one of the many books written during the political convulsions preceding World War Two, many of which saw very little nothing in the future but the constant grinding slaughterhouse of endless global conflict. But Wild Harbour is also a love story--that rarest kind, in fact, being a love story between people who are already married--and it is this beautifully realised emotional side to the story that gives the book its real kick.

Macpherson himself never saw the end of the war he thought might destroy the world. He was killed in 1944 in a motorcycle accident, not quite 40 years old himself. As far as I can discover, Wild Harbour was his last book.

It is also, sadly, out of print again, though relatively easy to find second-hand online. If I ever win the lottery (difficult if you never enter, but still), it will be one of the books I republish in the doomed-to-lose-money publishing imprint I would found, dedicated to bringing back lost masterpieces.

Wild Harbour also gets a very positive spiel in the frequently maddening 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (a book which inhcludes multiple books by New Age knobby-bottom Paul Coelho and absolutely nothing by Anton Chekhov). Unfortunately the reviewer himself (one Liam Connell) seems not to have read the book very well, given that he thinks it's set in 1914. Still, he's not dead yet, so he's still got time.

Interlude: A Random Selection of Pulp and Trash

A post that required not only no brains, but an actual negative quantity of brains...