Cover, Comics, and an Ill-Timed Bout of Blindness
Today I am slip sliding away above the clouds to the Windy City to join fellow bloggers in blogish comraderie. Tomorrow is the official conference and check out this schedule. Packed! I’m taking my microphone along, so expect an interview or two to come from the day. In the meantime, I’ve enough goodies to keep you satisfied, I think.
- Writer Steve Moffat (Doctor Who, Jekyll) is penning the DreamWorks’ Tintin movie, per the Hollywood Reporter . The Tintin movie trilogy is an adaptation of Herge’s Tintin comic strip and books, and comes from the combined creative minds of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, each of which will direct one of the movies.
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You know, when I heard that they had made Dark Crystal manga I joked that the next logical step would be to do some Labyrinth comics next. It was a joke, A JOKE! I was not serious. Therefore, the lesson here today is "be careful what you make fun of". Oh, lordy begordy. Thanks/tears attributable to Chrissy for the link.
- From HorseSense and Nonsense:
"Southern California’s Riverside Unified School District (RUSD), which at the beginning of the 2002-03 academic year instituted a ‘no novels’ policy for lower level English classes grades 7-12, has now upped the stakes. As of Fall 2007-08, even Honors courses are bound by the policy, demanding that teachers stick to the letter of the Holt, Rhinehart & Winston textbook and curriculum planning map and avoid primary sources of literature."
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Mark this one down as kid-friendly indeed. According to Publisher’s Weekly:
"Trafalgar Square Publishing has given several noted 19th-century novels a new lease on life, distributing Bloomsbury UK’s Bloomsbury Classics line of paperbacks stateside. The six books in the series are Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson."
Is it just me or does it look as if Meg Cabot wrote Pride and Prejudice? (peers closer)
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Ah. I see the problem. Despite being a different color than the title, somehow the real author’s name sort of slips into the top of the book, allowing the name below to appear to be the actual writer. Con-foosing, non?
Here’s some fun. Compare their Treasure Island cover, with Robert Ingpen’s relatively recent version.
Oh my. I just went blind.
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About Betsy Bird
Betsy Bird is currently the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library system and a former Materials Specialist for New York Public Library. She has served on Newbery, written for Horn Book, and has done other lovely little things that she'd love to tell you about but that she's sure you'd find more interesting to hear of in person. Her opinions are her own and do not reflect those of EPL, SLJ, or any of the other acronyms you might be able to name. Follow her on Twitter: @fuseeight.
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Those covers would make a grown man cry.
That’s what we’re resorting to? *Tricking* kids into reading the classics? ‘Cause that’s what this is. So passive-agressive. Ugh.
Add these covers to the horror that is Riverside, CA public schools and I’m ready to chuck it all and just be a florist or a chef or something.
Laura (still a librarian…for the moment)
May old Pew smite them where they stand.
You know, I was looking over the spring catalogs, and I think it was Penguin whose got a new wide swath of classics with really sort of bright but classy new covers that are still meant to appeal to young readers. Which I have no image reference to back me up on, but believe me when I say that they’re just sort of classic, but not dry.
But what has really been enjoyable in my Young Adult Classics section has been the Scott McKowen covers on the some of the hardback classics. Once I got over the fact that it wasn’t Barry Moser, I could just appreciate being able to stock a range of dignified classics that just felt right in the hand. Not disneyfied or hackneyed, and definitely not stale . It’s a relief, really.
I’m gonna say classics one more time, since I didn’t say it enough up there.
Classics.