Wednesday 12 August 2015

Crapping Out Classics

A quick round-up of recent developments in the world of hideous public-domain publishing...

Item 1: This splendid edition of the Bible from our old friends at Vexin Classics, which in no way confuses belief systems:



Item 2: Some delightful editions of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the cover designs of which shows all the subtlety and wit we've come to expect from the cheaparse cash-in merchants who populate Amazon's sewage-choked ebook library:




That last version claims to be "illustrated" by Zooey Hawkins. And it is, if by "illustrated" you mean "Photoshop filter run hastily over stolen promotional images from the recent movie adaptation".



Item 3: Further Pride and Prejudice investigations lead us to the nameless outfit responsible for these delights...






If the covers are any guide, the images in these "Color Illustrated" books should be very helpful indeed.

Item 4: The next stage on this short tour of hell is the strange world of Ronn Says, an Indian writer who "writes about various genres, and believes in spreading his experiences through his books. But primarily his genre is full fledged Romantic Novels. He is much acclaimed for his books". And you can see why, when they look like this...



..but he also dabbles in publishing the classics, with stolen movie posters on the covers, with these results...

Jane "Stone Cold" Austin


(One good thing about all this copyright theft from movies is that it adds several more books to the Keira Knightley Library of World Literature.)


..though he sometimes steers away from movies in order to experiment with era-appropriate stock photos...


..which leads us finally to Item 5: Further anachronistic up-fucking of Stephen Crane's US Civil War classic...

"Special" as in "special education class", I assume

Antietam, Vietnam, it's all the fucking same, right?

The War Between the States and the Arctic Centurions

Napoleonic Hussars devastated large swathes of Atlanta