I've just received cover pictures for the new, UK and Commonwealth, editions of three more diaries. They're very different to the US paperback covers but they're in the same style as the UK cover for Mr Darcy's Diary.
You might recognise the portrait on the cover of Mr Knightley's Diary. It also appeared on the hardback cover of Mr Darcy's Diary (which was called Darcy's Diary).
The new editions will be out at the end of January 2009, but they're available to order now from Amazon
I can't decide which I like best, the romantic US covers or the more classical UK covers. What do you think?
Amanda Grange
8 comments:
I think I have to go with the US covers -- I want to say they are better or nicer, but it could just simply be that I'm used to those more. Those are the covers that I look at when I'm holding my copy of the book. . . so if it were opposite, I probably would like the single male painting covers more. :)
Lois
Overall, I prefer the UK covers with one exception...the cover of Captain Wentworth's Diary is actually a portrait of the Duke of Wellington so, when I look at it I'm thinking Wellington not Wentworth.
As long as they say AMANDA GRANGE on the spine, I'm not bothered what the covers are like!
Thanks for all the comments, and thanks for the vote of confidence, Jan! Perhaps the best thing about it is that readers get a choice. The portrait covers will be on sale in bookshops in the UK and Commonwealth and the more romantic covers in the US, but online sellers offer both and so if readers have a favourite style they can choose what suits them.
Edmund's portrait is slightly too old-looking for me, but the others are quite nice! Wentworth's especially.
I still like the hardcover designs the best. These are nice designs but I am not crazy about the portrait choices for the particular books. And Wellington? Seriously, Wellington? It's not even the right branch of the military.
Bloody Americans can't get anything right! (she said, giggling)
To make up for the above bit of rabble-rousing, I will add that a group of Yanks of which I was one were the only ones singing along with "Rule Britannia" when they played it at the 200th anniversary celebrations of Trafalgar in Portsmouth a few years ago.
But in a more serious vein, if one reads Brian Southam's book Jane Austen and the Navy, one realizes why it's more than a simple mistake to use an image of Wellington on a book cover meant to show Captain Wentworth, it's an insult and a complete misunderstanding of a big part of what Persuasion was about. Southam writes that it was Jane Austen' gift to her sailor brothers, her way of showing the importance of the Navy, the sailors' "domestic virtues" as well as their military importance, at a time that the Navy had fallen out of fashion in light of the army's success at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It's as if Sir Walter Elliot himself designed the cover.
Amanda, you know I love the book itself, so I hope I will be forgiven for my little screed. :-)
I wondered what Sir Walter was doing with that box of crayons . . . Hope Dorothy's potions have worked, Mags, it's an exhausting business, rabble rousing :)
*sense of humor back in working order*
Thanks for that. :)
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