Last November, I interviewed book designer Coralie Bickford-Smith on the Penguin blog about her designs for a set of ten hardback classics, and how they made me want new cloth-bound editions of books more than I wanted, say, food. Or love. Definitely a lot more than I wanted love.
For the interview, I’d send her an image with a question in it, and she’d fill the remaining space with whatever she wanted, and then I’d send her another, and so on. It worked well and I’M NOT MADE OF IDEAS DAMMIT, so with a new set of ten more handsome volumes about to be published, we’ve done the same thing again.
[UPDATE, 9/10: The books are at last available through the Waterstone’s website. (Thank you to sarah b. for spotting them and commenting.)]
So, to recap, the books are published on 5 October, and you want them, or else, I guess you hate things that are nice? The Directorial Tea-Towel is available now, through the pleasingly named ToDryFor.com.
Here’s the full list of the ten books. They are, for the moment, exclusive to Waterstone’s. Titles link to images, ISBNs link to the book’s Waterstone’s page:
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott – 9780141192413
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – 9780141192420
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle – 9780141192437
The Odyssey – Homer – 9780141192444
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson – 9780141192451
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass – Lewis Carroll – 9780141192468
Emma – Jane Austen – 9780141192475
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence – 9780141192482
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – 9780141192499
The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint – William Shakespeare – 9780141192574
And eight of the ten titles from the last set are now available through Amazon and all ten in Canada through Chapters Indigo. Titles link to images, ISBNs to Amazon.co.uk:
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – 9780141040318
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – 9780141040363
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë – 9780141040356
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – 9780141040370
Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell – 9780141442549
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – 9780141040332
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – 9780141040349
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – 9780140455687
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë – 9780141040387
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde – 9780141442464
Please feel free to leave a comment if you find the books available anywhere else.
