We love books. And lately, we seem to be a smidge obsessed with judging books by their covers. After all, only a handful of days have passed since we wrote about artist Ruben Toledo’s enchanting cover collaboration with Penguin Classics.
After a brief but intense affair with Toledo’s reimagined covers of “Pride and Prejudice” and the like, we’ve found a new love: Harper Perennial’s summer collection of classic short stories from Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Oscar Wilde, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Stephen Crane. And to think, as as we’re soaking up the last days of summer, we almost missed the collection, which was released in late spring.
Maybe we’re just consumed with a bought of bibliomania, but we like to think that we’re finding more scrumptious cover art simply because we’re looking for it. After all, don’t you typically find beauty the more you seek it?
It was the color palette of the Harper Perennial collection that initially caught our eyes. Something about the neon pastels reminded us of the bright candy coating we’d find on treats in our Easter baskets. (You know, if we still got Easter baskets.) But it was the clever, minimalist art that had us itching to place orders for the entire set.
We appreciate that Adam Johnson, the man behind the cover designs, didn’t take the standard, stuffy approach to smacking an author image on the cover of each classic. His cardboard author cut-outs are a welcome reprieve from the predictable portraits we’re accustomed to simply passing over.
Sure, Johnson’s clever, minimalist designs will look smashing on our nightstands—and in our hands at our favorite nook of the local coffee shop, for that matter. But our love of this perfectly presented collection is not entirely superficial.
There is, of course, the matter of what you’ll find inside—a chance to get swept away in Cather’s frontier world or in Crane’s look at The Bowery section of New York. Every volume presents the opportunity to rediscover a master, one short story at a time. Bonus: Fingers crossed, you may just stumble upon a new favorite author as you read the contemporary story included in each book.
All six paperbacks are available at barnesandnoble.com for $10 each, so we admittedly may be forgoing a fall wardrobe splurge or two to nab the entire collection in one fail swoop. We can’t be the only ones infatuated with the idea of owning shelves upon shelves of pretty books, can we? Tell us, what do you think of Harper Perennial’s new collection?
