Why buy new books?

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Re-reading P D James

The other day I looked at our crowded bookshelves and thought, 'What is the point of buying new books when there are so many excellent books here that I haven't read for five, ten, fifteen years or longer?"

At the moment I'm re-reading Original Sin by P D James, a trade paperback published at £8.99 in 1995 by Faber & Faber.




The jacket shown here was borrowed from Amazon UK, but the copy I'm reading has a much more beautiful cover by Andrew Davidson with whom I have something in common. We both attended Norwich School of Art.

"He keeps alive a tradition which owes nothing to transitory fashions or the latest gadgetry, but which is based on the irreplaceable disciplines of objective drawing, a strong sense of design and the tactile pleasures of craftsmanship."

Do hit the link above to see some of the beautiful book jackets by Mr Davidson, including a recent commission by Paul Buckley of Penguin USA for the re-jacketing of the entire John Steinbeck series, two of them shown here.



For Original Sins, Andrew Davidson did a marvellous, rather creepy black and white drawing of Innocent House, the Thames-side Venetian-style palace owned by The Peverell Press, a fictitious London publishing house which will remind many readers of the John Murray imprint.