(Above: The Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Voltaire's Candide)
With Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter, I discovered a line of books by Penguin that are beautiful. They're the Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions. They have a great font for reading, rough page edges, and what they call "French flaps" which fold in from the front and back covers. Here's a great article about the art director for the series winning an international design award for this series. Check out the cover of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
The Little Women cover is also uniquely cool (though probably not for the literary purist).
I went over to Barnes and Noble and found some of the other books in the series that are just terrific. Penguin commissioned some cartoonists and other artists to draw the covers and it adds a whole other dimension to the novels. As a result, I ordered from Amazon.com Voltaire's Candide and Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, both of which are Deluxe Editions. They are a couple of dollars more than paperbacks but a few dollars less expensive than hardbacks--kind of a happy medium. In a couple of weeks they're releasing a Deluxe Edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road that I hope to get. When's Christmas again?
2 comments:
hm...sounds interesting. i should pick one of those up. i think jeffhalsey would enjoy them. he's been into comics lately, i think it had something to do with all the comic movies that came out this summer. i'm off to btsa today. have i mentioned how much i love it? plus, i'm working on my syllabus, need to change it up a bit. i'm inspired by your reading and running. and just one final question: where did summer go?
yeah, check them out; they're really cool--little works of art. it's hard to start the reading, but so rewarding once you get going. the wife and i have enjoyed keeping the tv off this summer (though we just cannot stay away from the olympics) and she's been reading about twice as much as me.
also, about 40% of the fun for me comes from discussing the book with someone, so a couple of my old college roommates and i are reading some of the same books.
my biggest literary challenge for sometime in the next 9 months or so is conquering the melville classic moby dick. found the penguin deluxe edition on half.com for a good price.
hope the start to your school year is a great one
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