Modcult

(Side note: I’ve had this sitting in the post queue for awhile, and flat out missed Halloween.)

The new covers for Penguin Classic’s Gothic Reds series really pop off the shelf. Coralie Bickford-Smith, a senion designer at Penguin whose work I’ve posted before, is responsible.

Penguin has posted a video interview with her on their blog, in which she discusses the cyanotype process and sources for some of the individual covers, including the use of her Ikea kitchen knife on Ambrose Bierce’s The Spook House.

I think the title selection here is excellent as well, since it veers towards the lesser known work of some of these authors (well, besides Poe).

Can Penguin please start making these available in the US? Otherwise, I’m going to be forced to order these from Amazon UK.

Had to post Coralie Bickford-Smith’s eye-catching cover for the Penguin’s current “Boys Own Books” edition of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, featuring illustrations by Mick Brownfield. You can see more of Bickford-Smith’s covers for the Boys Own series at Penguin’s Flickr page.

Bickford-Smith is also responsible, along with partner/illustrator Mike Topping, for the new round of Sherlock Holmes covers Penguin, inspired by vintage movie posters. There’s a nice walkthrough of their collaborative process by Mike and Coralie accompanied by pictures of the covers over at Scamp.

As a side note, the recent Penguin Classics collections all look quite fantastic and it’s a struggle not to pick up these new editions whenever I am lingering in a bookstore.