Thursday 11 March 2021

a book by its cover

Lit Hub curates a gallery of classic books with horrendously bad and misleading cover illustrations. There were too many good ones to pick from, a particular preponderance of Pictures of Dorian Grays, Middlemarches (Middlesmarch—spoonfuls, spoonsful, octopodes) and Jane Austin novels with a definite Young Adult energy or Moby Dick as an early 90’s manual for whale-watching, but we especially enjoyed The Scarlett Letter as a Planned Parenthood pamphlet. What’s your favourite? Be prepared to filter through a lot of stock imagery and typesetting transgressions (this is what happens when literature, intellectual properties enter the public domain) but nonetheless a good way to revisit one’s core curricula.