I'm baaaaaaaaack

Happy New Year! Or should  I say, Bonne Année! I'm back in the good old US of A and comfortably ensconced in my daily routine again, though my sleep cycles are still screwed up.

Being in France again was equal parts awesome and frustrating; awesome = gorgeous boulevards, awesome museums and delicious coffee, frustrating = my rusty French, being vegetarian in a meat-lovers paradise, and angry CDG airport employees.  Probably the best moment was being in front of Notre Dame when the clock hit midnight and hundreds of tourists and French people started screaming BONNE ANNEE as we popped champagne and staggered down the streets next to the Seine.  We capped off the night with a nutella-banana crepe and it was amazing.

I could talk about the trip for hours but this is a blog about books not my vacation, so to bring it back on target I want to tell you about my book buying binges in France.  When it was all said and done, we only managed to fit in 2 anglo-bookstores (Shakespeare and Company and The Abbey, a Canadian bookstore) out of the 8 or 9 I had on my list.  However, that turned out to be more than enough to feed my habit.  The most exciting thing about book shopping in Paris is access to all the beautiful UK editions of books, specifically Penguin UK, Picador and Vintage books.  Between the two of us, Jon and I snapped up 4 of Coralie Bickford-Smith's collection of redesigned F. Scott Fitzgerald classics, a beautiful Viking edition of Nicole Krauss’s The Great House, the gorgeous Picador editions of Cormac McCarthy’s Sutree, Outer Dark and Blood Meridian, a Picador edition of DeLillo’s Point Omega, a Vintage Classics edition of Heller's Catch-22, a Penguin UK edition of Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, and a White's Books pocket classic of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

I already owned most of the books that I bought, but I couldn't help myself!  I constantly wonder why UK editions are so much better designed than US editions; not to say that US books aren't pretty, but I always find myself attracted to the UK versions so much more. Do the British just have better taste?  I am seriously considering more vacations to Europe just to buy more UK books (not that I really need an excuse to want to go back to Europe!).

Now that I have quite a few duplicate books, I'm thinking about doing some book give-aways consiting of my (gently used) US copies.  Would anyone be interested in winning free books? FREE! BOOKS! Just need to think of fun little contests, HMMM.

More pictures of the beautiful beautiful books we bought after the jump.

Adventures in Tipsy Book Shopping

On Saturday, after enjoying several cocktails, I went tipsy book shopping at my local independent bookstore here in Columbus (The Book Loft for you out-of-towners).  Finding good books here can be hit or miss.  Sometimes they’ll have tons of great unknown books stocked and sometimes the shelves will be a desert wasteland. One thing that The Book Loft does well though is stock awesome book reprints.  They were the first place that I saw the now famous cloth-bound Penguin Classics and they also carry every copy of the Graphic Penguin Classics. 

This time, I discovered White's Books, a not-so-new publishing venture co-run by David Pearson, who is a former designer for Penguin and was behind some of the more beautiful Penguin books like the Great Ideas series.  Pearson simply wanted to reprint classics with good design as the main focus and when this concept finally came to fruition in late 2008, the book blog-o-sphere was atwitter and eventually the news even made its way to Apartment Therapy.  With all that attention, I’m actually pretty surprised I hadn’t seen these before.

Everything down to the endpapers and typesetting is carefully considered, and Pearson had some of his favorite designers come up with the bold, stylized covers.  They also have a blurb about the person that created the book cover on the paper belly band, which I thought was a really special touch and acknowledges the often underappreciated designer.  These novels are large and luxurious and make my little bookish heart melt.  I bought Sherlock Holmes, and promptly put the other 7 editions on my Christmas wish list *ahem*. You can buy them here.

The following titles are included in this reprint:

Emma – Jane Austen

Sherlock Holmes – His Greatest Cases – Arthur Conan Doyle

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

Sonnets and Poems – William Shakespeare

The Christmas Books – Charles Dickens

Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

According to The Fiction Desk, White’s Books will soon be publishing a series of Pocket Classics with covers illustrated by Joe McLaren.  The white covers and embossed look are meant to convey a letterpress feel and I think they’re fantastic.  I can’t wait for these to be available here in the U.S.! See what happens when you go tipsy book shopping? You discover an awesome new book publisher.