Penguin Modern Classics Obsession Part Seven:

Success! I finally manage to obtain the four UK/Canada Penguin Modern Classics Kafka books I talked about last October, the ones with the discontinued covers I dug so much. They have the same ISBNs as the editions with the hideous new covers, so I don’t even try buying them online, as there’s no way to know which cover I’ll get. Thus I resort to periodically combing book shops in Kafka-unenthusiastic locales to see whether I can find the older editions still languishing on the shelves. I find The Castle in Hamilton later in the fall, Metamorphosis in Toronto over the winter, and The Trial and The Great Wall of China at Munro’s Books in Victoria just last month. Shown above: the four acquisitions framed and on the wall, as previously proposed.

Penguin Modern Classics Obsession Part Six:

For your possible edification: The low-fi, necessarily incomplete, increasingly outdated thumbnail gallery that I use for browsing through the UK/Canada Modern Classics covers. Much easier than combing endlessly through Amazons .co.uk and .ca. (Created earlier this year via a few minutes of grepping the text of a Penguin catalog PDF of Modern Classics ISBNs and plugging them into Amazon image URLs.)

Out of those 377 covers, here are 147 more-or-less favorites.

While we’re at it, because they were included at the end of the PDF, the typographically excellent covers for Penguin’s Great Ideas series.

Penguin Modern Classics Obsession Part Five:

A caveat regarding my Penguin Modern Classics wall art: The cover images in and of themselves are not what appeal to me. If these images came merely in the form of individual photos or prints, without a book attached, I wouldn’t be interested. What interests me specifically are: 1) the combination of image and book, the fact that each image is an artful, spare representation of the literary work beneath it; and 2) having the book itself on display, as an object, which can later be removed and read.

However, I’m not so much into using individual books as art pieces, hung on the wall by themselves; rather, I’d only want to put book covers on the wall as elements in themed series. (As previously indicated.) That way, a large part of what’s on display are the associations I can create between the cover images — and, by extension, between the books themselves. (Also, it fills up more wall space. Horror vacui!)

My themed-series idea reminds me of something Rob Giampietro mentions in his Design Observer piece about the increasing trend toward shelving books by color:

Organizing his books by color allows him to discover new and unexpected relationships between books he knows well already. When two unrelated books are forced to occupy the same shelf simply because of their spine color, the shelver is asked to think about whether they have ideas to share between them. Perhaps the designers of these chromatically-related books saw something in the books’ content that even their authors did not.

What I’m doing is more or less a variation on this. Rather than arranging books by their spine colors, I’m simply using a different surface of the book. (This arrangement method doesn’t easily lend itself to bookcases, of course. Hence the wall.)

For completeness: The UK/Canada Modern Classics that I own not for domicile-adornment purposes, but to actually read: Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (read last year) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (currently still reading).

A convulsing, macabre Mexican Day of the Dead mask on the Lowry; the Martello Tower ethereally wreathed in the novel’s opening and closing words on the Joyce. Both are fine designs — better than any current U.S. editions of them — but I wouldn’t hang them up. The Lowry, I wouldn’t want that horrible thing grinning out at me from the wall all the time. And the Joyce, even if the book were not too thick for the shadow-box frames I use (which it is), I am only up to page 372, and I likely won’t be finished until sometime in the two-thousand-teens.

Penguin Modern Classics Obsession Part Four:

What follows is my non-exhaustive Penguin Modern Classics wish list — a selection of other exceptional cover designs whose books I would like to buy and frame, if money and wall space were no object. I have grouped them into ten themed series, ordered just as I would display them on the wall.

 
Series One: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Collected Short Stories; Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square; George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air; and the two Jean Rhys books Good Morning, Midnight and Quartet.

Series Two: Primo Levi’s Moments of Reprieve; Eugène Ionesco’s single-volume Rhinoceros, The Chairs, and The Lesson; Vladimir Nabokov’s Annotated Lolita; William Trevor’s The Children of Dynmouth; Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories; Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave; and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos.

Series Three: John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent; Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, André Gide’s The Immoralist, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Ernest Shackleton’s South.

Series Four: Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Wolfman’ and Other Cases, Albert Camus’s The First Man, Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason, Ronald Firbank’s Three Novels, Saul Bellow’s Herzog (already on the wall), Camus’s The Fall, and E.M. Forster’s Collected Short Stories.

Series Five: The two Steinbeck books The Log from The Sea of Cortez and The Short Reign of Pippin IV, and H.G. Wells’s A Short History of the World.

Series Six: The two Georges Bataille books Story of the Eye and Blue of Noon, Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor, and Anaïs Nin’s Henry and June.

Series Seven: Levi’s If Not Now, When?; Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading;
Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo; Steinbeck’s Cup of Gold; and John Buchan’s Greenmantle.

Series Eight: Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Nathanael West’s single-volume Miss Lonelyhearts and A Cool Million, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, and L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between.

Series Nine: Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, and Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels.

Series Ten: Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown, and Martin Amis’s Money. (As I have said before: I am a sucker for clouds.)

Penguin Modern Classics Obsession Part Three:

Another series of Modern Classics covers that I would like to have used as wall art consists of the following simple yet inspired designs for Kafka’s The Trial, The Great Wall of China and Other Stories, Metamorphosis and Other Stories, and The Castle.

Sadly, I fail to move fast enough on the idea, and Penguin for some unfathomable reason discontinues these covers over the summer. No idea what they were thinking, axing four of their strongest, most compelling covers. (N.B.: The Metamorphosis cover is now the only one I can find a non-thumbnail-sized version of.)

I’m not terribly happy with the new Kafka covers that Penguin replaces them with. (The newly-included fifth book is Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared.)

I assume I’m supposed to find these covers creepy. Creepy and weird and slightly nightmarish and somehow disturbing. All those qualities that get considered Kafkaesque. Right? The problem is, these covers are not creepy. What they are is unintentionally hilarious. They look, for lack of a better term, student-film-ish. Mostly I feel sorry for the poor photo models who had to strap that stuff on.

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.)

Penguin Modern Classics Obsession Part One:

My obsession with the UK/Canada line of Penguin Modern Classics begins last December, during a visit to a local bookshop, when I see this book cover:

I just about burst into flames at the awesomeness of this cover. Its simplicity, its symmetry, its monochromatic sleekness, its cleverly oblique reference to the content of the book — foregrounding Burgess’s grimly funny image of violent young men drinking glasses of milk, caught between adulthood and childhood. A startlingly subdued cover for a very unsubdued book, and a smart piece of graphic design.