Poor Charlotte Bronte

Browsing in the bookstore today when I saw this, which is part of Penguin's new campaign to repackage the best novels of all time as bestsellers:



















And it looks like Emily Bronte got the same treatment:



















It even makes the pastel-coloured Jane Austen chick-lit covers look half decent.

Cover this book!

An antidote, perhaps, to the chick-lit covers?

Penguin Books UK has begun selling six of its classic books with blank, art paper covers so readers can draw their own. They're calling it My Penguin, and Jane Austen is present in the form of Emma (though none are evident in the gallery on the website).

I'm not sure what this will do for sales, but I'm glad that Penguin is acknowledging that people do indeed judge a book by its cover. One of my literary/academic pet peeves are all the books about the Chinese-Canadian or Chinese-American experience that use stereotypical images of China or "Chinese-ness" in the cover art. (Yes, Amy Tan's books are repeat offenders.) Another are the covers of the otherwise-excellent Broadview Press editions of Austen's novels, which use photographs that are anachronistically at least 50 years later than the Regency period. When you're teaching these books to first-year students, you hope for as much historical accuracy as possible, and a cover like that is not going to help.