Penguin Graphic Classics

Have you seen the new Penguin Graphic Classics from the US arm of Penguin? They're beautiful!

Penguin Graphic Classics are basically books that have covers illustrated by graphic novel artists, such as Frank Miller and Art Spiegelman.

I have so far bought two of them, Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums and Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. They're wonderful! Even the inside cover flaps are very well illustrated.

I am so going to buy the rest in the series.

Here's the Penguin promo website.

I really love them. I've just bought a copy of Cold Comfort Farm : the paper is really thick and the covers are beautiful, I highly recommend the series. I hope they'll add more to it in the future :) My heart is quite set on The Portable Dorothy Parker too.

Several months ago, I picked up Gravity's Rainbow in this edition and had taken it to the checkout before I noticed that the pages had been poorly bound (or possibly irregularly trimmed, but I can't see how that would happen) to give a horrible 'stepped' effect along the page edge when looking at the book sideways on. Every copy I've seen since has been the same, so I assume the entire print run was like it.

The funky covers seem to be little more than an excuse to ratchet up the price of standard editions by a third. They're still highly covetable, however.

I adore this series--their marketing has worked on me. I have The Portable Dorothy Parker, Cold Comfort Farm, The New York Trilogy, and Candide is next on the list.

#3 - Diamat, it's called a deckle edge and it's done to give books a more valuable, slightly antiquated look. It used to be common to all handmade paper and had to be trimmed; it later came into fashion as a sign of a hand-made, limited or high-quality edition. There is actually an informative discussion about it here on LT, in the group "Rare, Old or Offbeat" : click "Deckled/uneven edges?".

Personally, from the ones mentioned in your posts above, I like the clean look of the covers with the black bottoms, such as Mikhail Lermontov's Hero of Our Time.