NEWS: Craft Inspired Covers

The Postmistress cover by Jenny Hart;  

The Jane Austen Book Club cover by Helen Musselwhite

We recently came across this article on 'Creative Review', about a series of Penguin books that are being re-published, with re-designed covers. Naturally enough, we love them!!

Six of Penguin's most popular recent fiction titles have been redesigned as a set with new craft-inspired covers. The Penguin By Hand series makes use of embroidery, crochet and quilting, with each technique further evoked on paper through the use of some serious embossing...

Publishing in September, the Penguin By Hand series features the following titles: The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak (cover by Emma Ruth Hughes); The Help by Kathryn Stockett (cover by Brenda Riddle); The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Banks (cover by Genevieve Dionne); The Postmistress by Sarah Blake (cover by Jenny Hart); The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler (cover by Helen Musselwhite); and The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards (cover by Dominique Falla).

In addition to being highly tactile books, the covers are surprisingly good at replicating the media they were originally created in – for instance, Brenda Riddle's cover for The Help looks and feels as if it has been made from quilted material.

Penguin have also commissioned artist Jillian Tamaki to design hand-sewn covers of three classics: Jane Austen's Emma, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, and Anna Sewell's Black Beauty.

Tamaki sketched the illustrations before stitching these designs with a needle and thread. The final covers are sculpt-embossed, maintaining some of the tactile texture of the original threads designs.
Although each book is new to the Penguin Classics Deluxe series, it seems Penguin chose these three books for various unrelated reasons. This will be the first standalone edition of Emma, this year marks the centennial of The Secret Garden's publication, and Black Beauty features a new foreword written by Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley.