Pulp Fiction - Classic Covers!

While trawling around the internet I came across these…

Classic novels and plays with pulp fiction covers!!! They’re not necessarily to my taste (I lust after those wonderful old Virago Modern Classics, with the dark green spines and paintings on the covers) but they are great fun. They’re bright, brash, colourful, lurid, gaudy, garish… even the edges of the pages are coloured.

This Pulp! The Classics collection is a new imprint from Oldcastle Books. According to the website, it ‘gives the nation's favourite classic novels original retro covers in a pulp fiction style - with a dash of wry humour’. The designs seem to owe a huge debt to popular culture, and the marketing blurb in the online catalogue is perfectly in keeping with the pulp fiction theme – and is an absolute hoot.

How about this for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll (due out in September):

This cupcake as OFF HER HEAD!

What HAS happened to little Alice? Taking 'shrooms, hanging out with hookah smoking ne'er do wells and being dragged to court. That's gonna be one hell of a hangover!

Or this enticing account of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (think James Dean and you’ll get the picture). Actually I quite like the idea of the monster as a disaffected biker!

This Kid was born on the wrong side of the Lab...

Frankenstein’s monster is on the rampage; terrorising the locals, unleashing murderous hell… and reading novels in his spare time. Can his petrified creator stop this reign of horror before his girlfriend gets the chop.

The front of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde includes a figure who bears an uncanny resemblance to rock star Alice Cooper (though it could equally well be said that Alice Cooper bears an uncanny resemblance to a character from a horror story), and another who I guess is Ozzy Osbourne. Romeo and Juliet are ‘Too wild to live, too young to die’; Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a busty blonde babe with a bottle of booze and a heart set on revenge, and Scrooge is a somewhat crazed Alastair Sim – a suitable tribute I feel, since he played the miser in the 1951 film.

This cat was a drag... till a midnight wake-up call.

Christmas?! What a load of Humbug. Mistletoe and Wine just don't do it for Scrooge; he's a workaholic miser with an attitude problem. If he doesn't change his ways, he'll end up with no friends and Tiny Tim won't last the year. Let's hope some spooky night-time visitors can put the jingle back in his bells!

Then there’s Darcy, who’s escaped the constraints of life in Georgian England and stares out at us with piercing eyes and a cigarette dangling from his lips. And summing up Pride and Prejudice the publishers tell us:

Mrs Bennet is on a mission to marry off her five daughters to rich men.
Enter, Mr Charles Bingley and his rather fit friend, Darcy. Love, loathing and bittersweet romance follow…

Even Jane Austen couldn’t argue with that statement. It pretty much says it all and, surprisingly, it’s actually quite accurate. In fact, all the book blurbs are cleverly written, encapsulating a few salient facts in very few words, using modern, slangy idiom. And, before you ask, the books appear to contain the original, unabridged texts. It’s just the packaging which is different – and perhaps that will attract new readers who might be put off by a more conventional and reverential approach.

So what does anyone else think? Do you like them? Do you think they might attract more readers? Or do you think covers should have images more directly linked to the story?

Castle Rackrent

Before reading Castle Rackrent my knowledge of Maria Edgeworth was limited to the fact that she is reputed to have been Jane Austen’s favourite author, and that Sir Walter Scott admired her. This was the first time I’ve read any of her work, and it’s been an interesting experience.

She was the eldest daughter of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, an Anglo-Irish landowner who had four wives (not all at the same time, obviously) and 22 children, which sounds extraordinary by modern standards. Born in England in 1768, she was only six when her mother (the first Mrs Edgeworth) died. The oddest fact about her (apart from her father’s proclivity for wives and children) is that while at school she almost lost her sight though an eye infection, and her father (who looms large in her story), recommended that she take up arithmetic because it ‘requires no attention of the eyes’, which sounds bizarre, but perhaps he felt resting her eyes would effect a cure.

On a more sensible note, when Maria was 14 the family finally returned to their Irish estate at Edgeworthstown, where she lived until her death in1849. From the outset she played a pivotal role in family life, teaching her younger brothers and sisters while continuing her own education under the tutelage of her father, and also helping him to restore and manage the run-down estate. She corresponded with many of the learned figures of her day, including members of The Lunar Society, and developed her own views on education, estate management and politics, but never married, insisting that it was better to remain a spinster than to have an incompatible partner.

The Edgeworth family home in Ireland

It’s worth noting that during the potato famine of the1840s she wrote a book to raise money for a relief fund to help the starving , and did what she could to publicise the crisis - but she was adamant that her own tenants would only receive assistance if they paid their rent in full.

As far as Maria Edgeworth’s writing goes, I was surprised to learn that she wrote children’s books and essays, as well as novels, and that she is considered to be something of a trailblazer by showing the Irish in real settings and reproducing their speech. In Castle Rackrent she includes a glossary set into the main text to explain these terms, with additional notes on history and customs. This was, apparently, a totally new device, but I thought it distracted from the story. Equally ground-breaking was the idea of using estate worker Thady Quirk as  narrator, telling us how four generations of Rackrents frittered their money away. Personally I found her style difficult.  It is a satire, and it was very funny in places, but the language seemed convoluted and archaic, the plot was thin and the characters lacked definition. However, this was her first novel, written in 1800, and I would like to read more of her work to see how her style developed – perhaps The Absentees would have been a better choice.

Maria Edgeworth when she was older, 

Trying to explain why she wrote, she said “Seriously it was to please my Father I first exerted myself to write, to please him I continued.” I get the impression she always had enjoyed telling stories to friends and family, and that maybe she hoped that through humourous novels she could highlight the need for change in the way Irish estates were managed. Whatever her reason for writing, Maria Edgeworth was hugely popular: for a time her earnings outstripped Scott and Austen, and she seems to have enjoyed the acclaim she received. She was more highly thought of in England than Ireland, but towards the end of her life she was made an honorary member of Royal Irish Academy. 


This was posted for the What's In A Name Reading Challenege at http://www.bethfishreads.com/2012/01/whats-in-name-5-type-of-house.html