Keep your eye on the prize

In May, you’ll visit your local Chapters or Indigo and your eye will once again be drawn to those favourite classics your literature professors used to make you buy. The House of Mirth, Dracula, A Tale of Two Cities; you know the ones. Except this time, there will be words in different fonts scrawled across the covers instead of the classic Penguin, looking abandoned with nothing other than the title and author to keep him company.

The cover re-design is apparently causing an uproar in the publishing world. Who really cares?

Missing the meaning

In a March 29 Maclean’s article, “Penguin classics get a makeover”, Jaime J. Weinman does a good job of stringing together opinions from those on both sides of the fence in his article. His reporting isn’t the problem.

He misses a key point the size of a pot-hole. People hate change. Moreover, people hate irrelevant change. We like to be handed our tall double mocha frappuccino in the same old Starbucks cup each morning and curl up with our age-old stories with the 1930s design on the cover. It’s the niceties that make us feel comfy and safe. These things don’t actually matter, but we tell ourselves they do.

Teaching an old dog new tricks 

Penguin, a British publishing house, makes reprints all the time. This is yet another example of making old gold into something new again.

Weinman writes: “By making the words the star of the covers, Penguin may be hoping to show that the actual content of the books is still fresh and accessible.”

That’s probably because many literature lovers come across these novels in their late teens, early 20s, when they attend university. I wonder how many people who have already read Tolstoy or Hawthorne actually care about the change.

 For Weinman’s full article (or to get a sneak peak of the new covers): http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/03/25/penguin-classics-get-a-makeover