Saturday 7 April 2012

Classics Challenge - April Prompt

This months prompt is all about one of my favourite topics - the book cover. Why is it my favourite? Well it means that I get to rave about how fantastic the covers of the Vintage classics are. I mean it, I have yet to find one that I didn't like. When other publisher print special editions of books I will sometimes go for those first. Like the Penguin cloth editions (how can you not). Otherwise I always hunt out the Vintage edition. If the shop doesn't have it I check to see if it maybe doesn't exist in that edition before buying a different one.

When I first saw this edition of Huckleberry Finn I fell immediately in love with it. I was buying Tom Sawyer at the time for another challenge. I couldn't leave this behind and so used the classics challenge as an excuse to purchase it. I love the freshness of it. It screams innocence. Which is what Huckleberry is, innocent.

From the cover of the book it's easy to see that Huck just wants a quiet life. He wants to spend his days lazing and fishing. In that sense it does reflect the book very well. I also mentioned innocence. Huck is actually quite a soft hearted character whose conscience is always bothering him (unlike Tom Sawyer). So in that way it's also a true reflection. It also depicts a scene of tranquility which is far from what actually happens to Huck but it's what he wishes for.

I'm not sure I would design the cover any differently from that. I suppose one of Huck and Jim on the raft would have been a good one but I am happy with the cover of this one.


Here is something else I love about the Vintage covers. They design themes around them. So that all the books by the same author are similar. That way if you just want the books of one author they are a matching set. This is the Tom Sawyer book and you can see how they match. The boys are out fishing when really they should be in school (well, I am guessing it's from that particular scene). You can see why I couldn't pick up one and not the other. I think most of the books I have picked out for this challenge are by vintage so you can look out for those covers if you are interested.

This challenge is organised my Katherine of November's Autumn. If you want to see what everyone else is saying about the covers of their books you can do so here. 

I've finished Huckleberry Finn and will try to review the book itself tomorrow.

9 comments:

  1. Beautiful covers!! I would have had to buy them both too :)

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  2. I LOVE the Vintage covers! I'm a fairly recent convert - and I still buy the Penguin Classics for translated books - but I adore the Vintage designs. I like the themes, like all the Austen books looking similar, and generally they're some of the nicest book covers I've seen of late. I always look for them first, and my copy of Cranford is so pretty I haven't even wanted to open it yet! :)

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    1. I got the penguin cloth edition of Cranford. Took a lot of will power to read it. Although it was a fantastic read.

      It's only been in the last year or so that I have begun collecting the Vintage. Now it's like an addiction. As soon as I see one I want to buy it.

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  3. Another Vintage! I really like the simplicity of this cover. I also like your comment about covers being designed around themes, and books by the same author being similar.

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    1. It's the simplicity of it that I love so much too.

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  4. I agree with you about Vintage covers, and while I like this one for Huck Finn, this doesn't at all represent the book for me. That said, this reflects the life Huck wants, but definitely not the one he gets, so maybe it is an appropriate cover after all.

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    1. I saw it more of reflecting what he wants rather than what he actually gets. The cover is really Huck's dream life.

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  5. Gorgeous artwork. It would have to stay out on the coffee table for full impact

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    1. I know, the spines of all the vintage classics are the same red. So you don't actually know what it is going to look like until you pull it off the shelf. One of the reasons why I love shopping for them.

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