Literary classics, meet modern illustrators

For as long as I can remember, the Penguin Classics book designs have been fairly simple and sleek, with the trademark artwork at the top, and black section at the bottom, broken by a white bar.

You know, like this:

I have a ton of these books on my shelf, from picking them up at used book stores, or buying them for classes at the university. That’s the great thing about Penguin Classics — they work to publish the most accurate translations of stories like The Odyssey, or to publish books that may have fallen by the wayside.

Now it looks at though Penguin is wanting to update their classic cover design — with a twist. They have commissioned comic and graphic novel illustrators for the covers. Artists like Frank Miller, Art Speigelman, and Michael Cho, who talks about his experience on his blog, have created covers for Gravity’s Rainbow, The New York Trilogy, and White Noise, respectively.

I think this is a fantastic way to update Penguin’s look, and it enables the artists to get their work to a different (if not wider) audience.

See all the covers in the flickr set here.