Maybe it’s just me but my first thought when seeing this was the exercises in question were related to office sex.  The book in question is from 1981.  Either way, this is something I would expect to find in my grandma’s attic.  [via Lucas]

M.S. Corley redesigned the covers for Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (still haven’t read the third one yet, how’d that happen?) to resemble Penguin Classic covers.

You’ll have to head over to his site to see his sublime work on the other two.  I hadn’t realized that the first book was called The Northern Lights in England and not The Golden Compass. I guess the Golden Compass is more in line with the other two books, but I rather like The Northern Lights as a title.

More exciting though, is that he is working on covers for The Chronicles of Narnia with this very style.

I love the retro-ness of it.  It’s like stumbling onto something amazing up in grandma’s attack.

In some instances you can judge a book by its cover. Or at least you can judge how much care and attention to detail went into putting a book together. Book cover art is a form that is often overlooked and little about the artists behind them are unknown. But like anything it too deserves to be celebrated.

Readerville Journal is a place that has been compiling and celebrating the art and artists of book cover design since 2000; here’s this year’s installment.

Did your favorite book make the list? I haven?t actually read any of the books on the list, but I?m really partial to the Penguin reissue of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Simple and elegant and conveys such depth, though like they say, we could do without the “Now a major motion picture” emblem.

Also? This was a bad year for reading for me. I might have tied my all-time low output for reading. Pathetic. But, I’m now salivating at the thought of getting my hands on the newly redesigned covers for Ian Fleming’s James Bond Series. [via]

George Orwell’s seminal novels 1984 and Animal Farm get redesigned covers courtesy of artist Shepard Fairey [OBEY]. If these covers don’t make kids want to read the books, I don’t know what will. Other than teachers forcers them to read them and love them and take umbrage against the state.

From the Penguin Blog:

This edition is not the Penguin Modern Classics edition. This edition is the one we want to get into the hands of school kids, to grab their short attention spans. So yes, putting the key words – Big Brother, Thought Police, Room 101, Ministry of Truth – in there is important, but that is no reason to leave the story or the characters out. The great thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it is so unsettling, it is so terrifying and bleak (and not much fun as satire, either). To get that across we need to know what’s at stake – what Big Brother is opposed to. We need Winston and Julia, their hopes and love, their humanity. Without Winston and Julia there is no tension, no story.

[via]