I’d read any of these in a shot. The sad robots! The inexplicable miniature elephant and its suave ape owner! The charming alien tourist breaking the 4th wall! No wonder science fiction magazines used to cram superlatives into their titles – they earned ’em.

I didn’t realise that as well as writing genre-defining classics like The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, Wells has also been called the father of miniature war gaming.

He wrote two books, Floor Games and Little Wars (what a title), of rules and theory for playing games with children’s toys and toy soldiers. Little Wars includes a description of a game from the point of view of a caracitural general relating it as a battle from his storied past, beginning:

… suddenly your author changes. He changes into what perhaps he might have been—under different circumstances. His inky fingers become large, manly hands, his drooping scholastic back stiffens, his elbows go out, his etiolated complexion corrugates and darkens, his moustaches increase and grow and spread, and curl up horribly; a large, red scar, a sabre cut, grows lurid over one eye. He expands—all over he expands. He clears his throat startlingly, lugs at the still growing ends of his moustache, and says, with just a faint and fading doubt in his voice as to whether he can do it, “Yas, Sir!”

I don’t know anything about war games. (I am a nerd, but not that kind of nerd.) But I like the fact that Wells’ game makes use of spring-loaded cannons firing wooden cylinders. In Little Wars he says, ‘Whenever possible, death should be by actual gun- and rifle-fire and not by computation. Things should happen, and not be decided.’

If you’ve read Infinte Jest, that might make you think of nuclear-annihilation-and-tennis game Eschaton (or it did me, anyway), which similarly operates with real-world actions (tennis ball lobs) impacting on the accepted pretense of a game world (nuclear explosions). Or at least it operates until debate (does real world snow dictate game-world snow?) becomes violence and the end of play.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, design by gray318

Unfortunately, what with the decline of proper journalism and whatnot, nobody thought to ask the really important question here: What renegade genius working an admittedly low-level job in the publisher’s marketing department suggested keeping the title off the cover?

Last year I was a copywriter at Penguin and wrote a lot of blurbs for the Classics lists. So you get used very quickly to seeing your words on books by some of the greatest writers who ever lived. The job was a joy from start to end and there’s not a lack of things it was a thrill to be able to work on.

But getting to use the iconic language of Orwell’s classic like this, and having the editor take the idea to gray318 (who is, you may know, in a league of his own) and have him come up with this absolutely perfect design across front, back and spine (and throw in a couple of endpapers that would have made great Orwell jackets in their own right), was perhaps the best of a lot of gratifying moments.

Here’s the full design:

Inside front cover

Inside back cover

So thank you Jon Gray, thank you Penguin and thank you George Orwell. You made me a very happy man.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · George Orwell · 9780141191201 · at the Book Depository · at Amazon.co.uk

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