'From Jane Eyre' to Thoreau, gifts for lovers of lit
It's a neat trick, one I fall for every time. Take a great work of literature - like "Jane Eyre" or "Sense and Sensibility" - and wrap the words up in a handsomely designed hardcover binding. Maybe sew in a ribbon bookmark. I want the books that matter most to me to travel with me my whole life long; for all their convenience and economy, paperbacks can't always promise endurance.
This season, Penguin Classics, the standard bearers for paperback reprints of the literary canon, has released a series of eight English masterworks - including novels by Austen, Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Hardy and Wilde - in clothbound editions ($20 each) exquisitely fashioned by Coralie Bickford-Smith, a rising star of British design. Each volume's cover has a repeating pattern that cleverly refers to the work at hand: chandeliers (like the ones at Miss Havisham's) for "Great Expectations," thistles and thorns (the kind you might find on the moors) for "Wuthering Heights."
Penguin's hardcover classics series includes the tried and true, but you may have a well-versed littérateur on your shopping list in need of a book or two off the beaten path. Two boutique publishing houses have won cult followings by curating paperback series of undiscovered international literary treasures and books that went out of circulation too soon. New York Review Books Classics has recently restored to print previously uncollected stories by the underappreciated Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant. "The Cost of Living" ($16.95) is introduced by Jhumpa Lahiri, who describes Gallant as "one of the greatest literary artists of her time," her work as "vast and searching." Italian writer and artist Dino Buzatti's phantasmagorical graphic novel "Poem Strip" ($14.95) is a lusty retelling of the Orpheus myth set in 1960s Milan. And "The Journal: 1837-1861" ($22.95), edited by Damion Searls, is the most comprehensive single-volume edition of Henry David Thoreau's diaries ever published.
London-based small press Persephone Books is a kind of sibling to New York Review Books, unearthing lost 20th century titles, mostly by women novelists. This year brings four new entries to their lovingly designed series of Persephone Classics ($18 each). Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Making of a Marchioness" is a Cinderella tale for adults by the author of "The Secret Garden." Noel Streatfield's "Saplings" traces a middle-class family as its children are evacuated from London during World War II. "Cheerful Weather for the Wedding," by Julia Strachey, is a comic novella about a young woman about to marry the wrong man. And Agnes Jekyll's "Kitchen Essays" is a collection of charming London Times columns about cooking and entertaining from the 1920s.
Here follows a grab bag of literary gifts. For your favorite ornithologist, or your favorite poetry lover, or some combination of both: the Billy Collins-edited "Bright Wings" (Columbia University Press, $22.95), an anthology of verse about birds by such poets as Marianne Moore, Mary Oliver, John Clare and Wallace Stevens, with delicate illustrations by field-guide artist David Allen Sibley.
For the budding creative writer: a boxed set of "The Paris Review Interviews" ($65), four volumes that cull six decades of dialogues from the legendary literary journal, with thoughts on craft by Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Alice Munro and many others.
For the reader of international fiction: Gunter Grass' German-language classic "The Tin Drum" (HMH, $26) has been newly rendered into English by Breon Mitchell, who restored previously omitted passages.
For the Russophile: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky continue their project of seemingly retranslating all of Russian literature, with a new edition of Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories" (Knopf, $28.95) following on the heels of their acclaimed "War and Peace."
Finally - In stores now! Don't delay! The literary event of the season! - there's "Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements" (Ecco, $26.99), edited by New York Times critic Dwight Garner. These small but punchy ads bring back a time when new books were an essential part of the cultural conversation, and when publishers had money to take out ads in newspapers - indeed, when newspapers still thrived.
