Penguin Modern Classics Obsession Part Two:

After the Clockwork Orange cover gets its hooks in me, I begin looking up other Penguin Modern Classics titles on Amazon.ca and Amazon.co.uk, and I find that the whole line of UK/Canada Modern Classics is imbued with the same smart, stylish design aesthetic in its book cover imagery. (Whereas the U.S.-based Penguin Classics series’ covers pretty much all look incredibly boring and stodgy, thus very efficiently encouraging American readers to stay the hell away from classic literature.)

At some point I determine that I absolutely must buy a number of these Penguin Modern Classics solely for their covers, and then frame them in shadow-box frames and hang them up on the apartment walls. And that is just what I do.

THUS: On our main living room wall: E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, Saul Bellow’s Herzog,
the aforementioned Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, John Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I suppose there is a subtle writing theme to these five covers. (Isn’t a tall frosty glass of milk always refreshing in the middle of writing something?)

Arranged vertically on the wall in front of my desk, beside the window: an Antoine de Saint-Exupéry trio: Southern Mail/Night Flight; Wind, Sand and Stars; and Flight to Arras. I’m a sucker for clouds. (And I freely admit that these three book covers were what got me started reading Saint-Ex back in July.)

In the TV room, three misfits: Albert Camus’s The Outsider, Patrick Kavanagh’s The Green Fool, and Timothy Findley’s The Butterfly Plague. (The Kavanagh and Findley had been part of our living-room series back at the old bat-infested apartment, though they were orphaned when we reduced the series from seven down to five here at the new place. The Camus I found in a bookstore and bought on impulse, because Penguin has discontinued this great cover and I had to have it before it disappeared.)