Favorite books get a makeover
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In our pages, Jane Smiley looked at some visually delicious reissues. Penguin, which started with paperbacks in 1935, has taken classics and put them between some tempting hardcovers: above, ‘Wuthering Heights,’ ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey,’ ‘Tess of the D’Ubervilles’, ‘Cranford,’ ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility.’ Smiley writes:
They are beautiful, they are tactile, covered in cloth with embossed designs. When I invite my friends over, they look at the covers, flip them over, feel the deckle-edged pages, open them to see the typeface. One friend, busy and involved with the newest of new media, at once imagines herself reclining on a brown leather couch and reading ‘Jane Eyre’ (578 pp., $20) at her leisure -- 26 ounces, black covers embossed with shiny red leaves, a red ribbon bookmark twinkling from the bottom edge.
She looks at other series too, including Harper Perennial’s Olive. In it, modern classics are giving an edgy twist -- don’t adjust your monitor, those are smudgy stripes above wrapping the spines of ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’ ‘The Bell Jar,’ ‘Fast Food Nation,’ ‘Everything is Illuminated’ and ‘The Crying of Lot 49.’
If you’re thinking these are making their way to shelves just in time for the holidays, you’re probably right. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
