Literary aesthetes/crafty nerds, take heart! Penguin Classics, ever popular for their artsy, modern designs, is taking things even further this fall: hand-sewn covers for Emma, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty! Or, at least, the originals were hand-sewn—the mass-produced versions will use sculpted emboss, which (according to the Google machine and my limited understanding of non-standard cover design; Miss Osborne could doubtless fill in the gaps) is a non-thread, non-manual-labor sort of endeavor. Which, hey, might be okay, considering the thorny issues surrounding who exactly would be doing the embroidery of thousands of ostensibly non-exorbitantly-priced mass-market books. In any case, the covers were created by artist Jillian Tamaki (check out process photos here), who apparently said that she would not be taking commissions for embroidery work unless Penguin Classics invited her to embroider their books. Which just makes me want to say, Hey, I will never write for television unless it’s for whatever Bryan Fuller‘s doing next! Nor will I ever take a writing job on the internet unless it’s for Go Fug Yourself! And I certainly won’t write for print unless it’s for The New Yorker. OBVIOUSLY.

Sooooo, I’ll just be over here, waiting for the phone to ring. Yup, aaaaany second now.

Via The Atlantic.

Tagged: Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, book covers, Bryan Fuller, cover designs, embroidery, Emma, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Go Fug Yourself, Jillian Tamaki, Penguin Classics, The New Yorker, The Secret Garden on Wednesday, March 30, 2011 · 4 Comments »