Thursday, November 20, 2008

P-p-p-pick Up a Penguin...

When I was little I often got books from my Grandparents for Christmas, beautifully inscribed with their well wishes. I still have most of them. Enid Blyton features heavily in my library! I love getting books as presents. Especially nice hardbacks that will live on my bookshelves for years to come. But I have to admit my bookshelf doesn't hold many of the 'classics' - and the few that I do have tend to be cheap paperbacks picked up for a few euro, often second hand - almost all a bit ratty at the edges. And I must go further and admit that alot of them haven't even been read - I've given up on many of them half way through. But then I saw this beautiful new Penguin Classics collection designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith, and I found myself wishing my Grandparents still gave me books for Christmas. And I found myself thinking that if this collection of Classics sat on my bookshelves I would read them all, cover to cover, then start again. Or maybe they'd sit on the shelves half read. But it wouldn't matter because they would look beautiful. And I would just look at them every day and admire the gorgeous covers. And that would make me happy.



If just looking at these beautiful books makes you feel happy you should go over to the Penguin blog where you can read an interview with the designer Coralie Bickford-Smith and see some of her other work. (The Penguin blog is a new discovery but I think it may become one of my regular reads.) You can see the books in more detail on Flickr and you can buy them exclusively in Waterstones.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

they're beautiful

yulanda said...

I would love to have a set of those on my bookshelf as well.

Winnie said...

I have a friend who has been collecting these, they would look so beautiful on your bookshelf!

Johanne M. Aa. Laache said...

Oh, dear, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, and more! I can understand why you want them, the covers are updated, but still capture the essences of the books/authors... Good luck with them!

Hebden said...

Oh, these are gorgeous!