To celebrate the 60th anniversary of its line of low cost paperback editions, Penguin Classics has tapped the talents of some of today's leading graphic artists including Art Spiegelman (In the Shadow of No Towers), Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan), Charles Burns (Black Hole), Seth (Palookaville), and Roz Chast (The New Yorker), to provide covers for new editions of a number of classics including Voltaire's Candide (Chris Ware), The Portable Dorothy Parker (Seth), Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (Charles Burns), Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (Art Spiegelman) and Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm (Roz Chast).
Paul Auster's New York Trilogy should be of particular interest to pop culture retailers because Auster's interlocking New York novels have inspired graphic novel adaptations (City of Glass) and because of Spiegelman's self-reflexive 'distressed' cover that looks likes it has already been on your shelf for years.
If Spiegelman is the perfect choice to provide the cover for Auster's post-modern thrillers, then Charles Burns, this modern age's answer to Ivan Le Loraine Albright, is clearly the right artist to distill the essence of Sinclair's unflinchingly realistic novel about the exploitation of men and animals in the turn-of-the-century meat-packing houses of Chicago -- and who better than Chris Ware to illustrate the puncturing of the Panglossian optimism that Voltaire skewers so adroitly in Candide?
