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Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: jezebel, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 4 of 4
1. Real or Not Real? Cover Up - Tiny Rant (1)


So by now you've probably seen the Jezebel post about hideous new covers for some classic books like The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery.


If you haven't, click here and then come back.

So. Faber & Faber (The Bell Jar) I think is a Macmillan company in the US, and this is the UK cover. I actually kind of like the cover art, at second glance. It's not so much sexualizing the book as evoking the thought of a woman applying a mask, pretending to be happy, but the mask is slipping--and she's almost out of makeup. I don't like it as much as the US trade paperback cover (shown later in this post). 

The Breakfast at Tiffany's cover is from Viking which is a Penguin imprint. It's not so much pandering to a female buyer as it is, well, just not as classic as the first edition:


Gorgeous.

I feel you should only be allowed to tote that around in public if you look like this:


Image from Mac and Me

So that leaves Night & Day by Virginia Woolf, an Anne of Green Gables omnibus, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's feminist Herland. Here comes the rant! News flash: these covers were selected by not-real publishers. These are self-published, Print-on-Demand (or POD) titles from Createspace.com and Readaclassic.com. 

You know why there seem to be so many different copies of books like The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, or Moby Dick by Herman Melville? Once the copyright for a work has lapsed and no one holds license or title to it, anyone can go and reproduce it and resell it--this is called Public Domain. So someone had the bright idea to take this farm girl photo and slap it on Anne of Green Gables, never mind that the model in the photo is blonde and kind of skanky looking, while Anne is supposed to be a sparky redhead. And while big publishers once in a while mess up covers on a huge scale, I don't think any of them have quite let their standards fall this low.

So people, calm down. 

When you go to the bookstore, this is probably the cover you will see on The Bell Jar:


A lovely design from HarperPerennial

And this is probably the most common cover art for Anne of Green Gables:


Or some variation of this. 

Dover, who, yes, is a real publisher, and not some guy with a computer and Windows Paint, has these nice-looking thrift edition covers for Herland:



Kind of classic, really. 

And Night & Day by Virginia Woolf might look like:


Oxford World's Classics (above), Penguin Classics (below)


Very serious, indeed.

My favorite cover is actually this one:


From Vintage books.

So relax, people. These self-pub shops don't have oversight, no one to go, "Wait--I think Anne's supposed to be a ginger..." Most of the time this lack of oversight is why I refuse to read books from Createspace/Smashwords or any self-pubbed outlet. 

Also, while we're at it, stop complaining about Twilight-ized classics. As a designer and someone who works with book publicity, I actually thought that was a kind of clever marketing decision, and I'd covet them if I didn't already have like, 6 copies of Pride and Prejudice that have better binding than the cheap paperback one. 

Ok, truth: I covet them anyway. They are so pretty! If only the binding were sturdier. (Yes, I think about these things a lot.)

</rant>

Do you have any covers you love, or ones you love to hate? Leave a comment below.

6 Comments on Real or Not Real? Cover Up - Tiny Rant (1), last added: 2/13/2013
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2. Ypulse Essentials: Time-shifting Team Coco, Disney Junior To Launch Valentine's Day, 'The Most Dangerous Show For Teens'

Time-shifting Team Coco FTW (Contrary to recent buzz that Jay Leno was attracting just as many young viewers as Conan O’Brien, more comprehensive ratings data — including the sizable DVR crowd — show "Conan" still holding court as the... Read the rest of this post

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3. Librarian Avengers Stomp of Approval – Shelf Discovery

Bad books aren’t worth talking about. Good books, however, should stand up and be recognized.

Shelf DiscoveryTo that end, I invented a new thing that I’m going to act like I’ve been doing for ages: The Librarian Avengers Stomp of Approval.

As you know, Librarian Avengers stomp around quite a bit, railing against things and waving our arms around.

In this case, we’re stomping in approval of Lizzie Skurnick’s new book Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.

Shelf Discovery is a compilation of Ms. Skurnick’s excellent Fine Lines posts on Jezebel, in which she lovingly scrutinizes Young Adult books read by bookish girls of the X/y/whatever generation.

I’m always surprised to find such quality writing just floating around on the web for anyone to read, and I’m glad there is finally a dead tree version available as well.

greenbooks.pngIf I suffered from Pageant-Mom syndrome and wanted to create an exact replica of myself from the raw material of some random pre-teen girl, I would begin my narcissistic experiment in literary manipulation by having her read all of the books celebrated in Shelf Discovery.

Which is all to say that I love this book and you should too. So, yay.

Stomp stomp stomp stomp.

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4. Fine Lines: Jezebel reviews the books that we 30somethings loved in our youth

Book cover from The Girl with the Silver EyesI want to talk about YA books for girls in the 1980s. Books like Anastasia Ask Your Analyst, and The Girl with the Silver Eyes.

Besides PBS and the Thundercats, these books were pretty much the only media I had available during my nerdy nerdy youth. And since I hadn’t been sentient for too long, so they had a disproportionate impact on my social development.

I wasn’t alone. The fine ladies at Jezebel (One of those Gawker media blogs. I’m usually against ‘em. This one, however doesn’t suck.) do a recurring feature called Fine Lines, which is UNCANNY in its ability to suss out YA books from my misspent youth.

I checked out an average of 14 books a week from two different local libraries, thanks to my geek parents. Most of the books I read were comic anthologies like Peanuts, Bloom County, Garfield and (odd for a 12 year old) Doonesbury. However, the books that really got through were the ones like Island of the Blue Dolphins, or From the mixed up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankeweiler.

Fine Lines has them all, lovingly glossed and tinted with a healthy dose of grown-up lady perspective. Go. Go now. Read and remember. You were not alone.

0 Comments on Fine Lines: Jezebel reviews the books that we 30somethings loved in our youth as of 8/4/2008 2:44:00 AM
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