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.
2 comments:
I think you should draw covers on your students' essays. That would be fun...
Ironically, enough, I just helped to revamp a survey about "chinese-canadianness" and what that means to the visual arts. Like you, many so called Chinese Canadian artists seem averted to this label. Myself included.
That said, what does it say about the status of the visual in our society when just about anyone can doodle and we don't need illustrators anymore? I guess at least it allows people to be creative. In their own visually illiterate way.
Anyways, I'm not as bitter as I seem. Just poor.
Post a Comment