I'm in Love...thanks to Royall

Royall, where ever did you ever find these lovelies? Why don't I know about these beautiful books! Needing to know that these books could be obtained, I panicked as I first checked out the UK store, where they are mostly sold out, then I checked eBay - no dice, then the US - Barnes & Noble with spotty results....and then Chapters online...sold out on line, every single copy, but they ARE available in store, various locations. Whew. Seriously, I was hyper ventilating! I actually own most of these titles, some in leather bound...but that hardly matters at all.

They are too beautiful to pass up.

I found this funny blog interview on the Penguin website about Coralie Bickford-Smiths book sets - here it is:

Designing classics

A couple of months ago, I interviewed Penguin designer Coralie Bickford-Smith in a video about her covers for the Gothic horror series. This last week we had another conversation, this time by email. I'd send her an image file with a question at the top, and then she'd fill the rest of the picture with anything she wanted and send it back, and then I'd send her another one.

This is the conversation, and that's me in the Helvetica:

The hardback classics are exclusively available at Waterstone's and through the Waterstone's website. Here's the full list, with a link to an image of each book:

Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell
Tess of the d'Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

Coralie is too modest to say so, but she also just won an award for best 'Brand or Series Identity' at the British Book Design and Production Awards. She won for the Classic Boys' Adventures series, which you can buy as a complete set with an exclusive poster right here. (Is this not the greatest cover ever?)

And she designed this luxurious three-volume giftset of our new translation of The Arabian Nights (published at the end of the month), which are perhaps the most handsome books I have ever touched:

(Note for possible future misery memoir: Coralie designs books so nice that touching them makes me feel inferior.)

I suppose what I am getting at is that if you were to follow Coralie around and buy every book she designed, you would have a very beautiful library. No doubt her ability to make books so desirable will turn her into a figure of hate during this economic downturn, as she renders people unable to resist buying elegant hardback books, when they should really be eating instead. I am hungry, Coralie! Please stop this! My infant child needs shoes! Coralie, I ate his shoes!

Still, good work.

Alan
Copywriter

......................................................................Then, look at this fantastic set for boys literature, oh to have boys again; maybe I will get this set too, for my grandchildren when they come to visit Grammie's house:

The latter half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, were the heyday of the modern adventure novel. In these stories ordinary men pitted their brawn and wits against foreign spies, terrific monsters and strange lands.

The twelve classic adventure stories that make up the Boys' Adventure stories set are timeless tales of young men of action risking their lives against dark deeds and impossible odds.

» Click here to view the Boys Adventure exclusive poster