November 23, 2006


Draw Your Own Adventure

Penguin’s just announced a new series of My Penguin classics with “naked” front covers—white “art-quality” paper, blank save for the Penguin logo:

Blank Emma cover


It’s up to you to clothe them, in illustration or collage or whatever, and if you e-mail it to Penguin they’ll post it to their online gallery (presumably only if it’s not infringing someone else’s copyright or offensive to Community Standards).

So my first thought, being three weeks into DrawMo! (and at least three days behind in daily drawing), is, “What, so I can screw up the first attempt and then have to buy another copy of the book?” Very clever, those Penguin people—way to flog that backlist!

I see the market for this series as (a) artists who are much more confident than I, (b) besotted parents who frame every one of their children’s drawings, and (c) Lionel Shriver.

There are six titles in the series:

  • Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
  • Jane Austen, Emma
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
  • The Brothers Grimm, Magic Tales
  • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • Virginia Woolf, The Waves

In other words, my least favorite Austen book, a version of Grimm that’s not the good gory one I grew up with, and four other books that I’ve managed never to read. (My ancestors chose the name “Amos” coming through Ellis Island; our name in the Old Country is believed to have been “Ignoramus.”)

According to the Penguin Blog, these books release at the end of the month, so they’ll be available when I’m in London the first week of December. Should I buy any? What would you do for the cover of any of these? Do you think this is a good idea? What do you book jacket designers make of this?

[Cross-posted from India, Ink.]

posted by India in books, design 

comments

4 Responses to “Draw Your Own Adventure”

  1. Deron Bauman on November 27th, 2006 at 12:51 pm

    at first I thought it was a penguin branded journal, which was intriguing. I’m less interested in this, but don’t hold it against anyone who is.

  2. Sheila Ryan on November 27th, 2006 at 1:52 pm

    What’s the pay-off? That’s what I’m wondering.

    So I wipe clean my mental Etch-a-Sketch and concoct a “Dorian Gray” cover free of any reference to Ivan Albright. Or I devise something beautiful and clever by way of a cover for the “Meditations” of Marcus Aurelius.

    And . . . my profit on’t is . . . my work is posted to Penguin’s online gallery?

    Well, jiminy-cricket, what’s in it for me?

  3. India on November 27th, 2006 at 2:23 pm

    Beats me. But somebody must want them, right? At least, somebody who works at Penguin did . . .

  4. Sheila Ryan on November 27th, 2006 at 2:28 pm

    Yes, indeed. Somebody who works at Penguin must want them.

    And I think that I must be growing paranoid in my dotage.