Dracula Book Cover Collection

Do you have an old copy of Dracula? If so, I'd love to add as many different covers to what I've already posted here. The popularity of my post on the War of the Worlds Book Cover Collection and the fun I had looking over all of those images made me want to do a similar thing here with my favorite Count.

Dracula was originally published in 1897. The yellow jacket was supposed to warn readers the the book's contents contained pornography. There's nothing pornographic about Dracula by today's standards and subsequent editions of the book quickly lost the yellow jacket. First edition copies of this book sell for $10,000-75,000.

What followed in Dracula's book cover design reflects what aspects of the novel publishers thought would appeal to the reading public. It's also a fine collection of book cover art!

Doubleday & McClure, 1899.

(This was the first American edition.)

1901 Edition 

Archibald Constable & Co., 1901.

(This copy is actually on sale for over $9,000.)

Doubleday, 1902

Constable, 1904.

Archibald Constable, 1904.

Rider & Son, 1916.

Country Life Press, 1927.

William Rider & Son, 1925.

Rider & Co., 1927.

Grosset & Dunlap, 1930.

Modern Library, 1932.

Oifig Dublin, 1933.

Armed Services Editions No. 851, 1945

Pocket Books, 1947.

Modern Library, 1960.

Marabout, 1963.

Limited Editions Club, 1965.

Penguin Classics, 1993.

Barnes and Noble, 1996.

Dover Thrift Edition, 2000.

Centipede Press, 2007.

Simon & Schuster, 2011.

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War of the Worlds Book Cover Collection

Ever go for a walk with someone, maybe your brother, and start talking about something crazy, like what if aliens or zombies descended on the scene. What would you do? Where would people hide? How would you survive? H.G. Wells had just that sort of walk, actually with his brother, and it resulted in The War of the Worlds (1898).

It's so fun to think that idle talk about martians landing in Surrey resulted in a book that has never been out of print and is one of the most inspirational novels of all time. The book cover collection is a testament to that fact, which is sincerely worth a look (click here). Here are just a few of my favorites:

Folio Society, London, 2004, English

Gong Ye Chu Ban She, Hong Kong, 2004, Chinese

Editora Sextante, Brazil, 2000, Portuguese

Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, Moscow, 1983, Russian

Marvel Comics, Editora de Periódicos S.C.L. (La Prensa), 1981, Spanish

1976 Marvel Classics edition 

Contact, 1971, Dutch

Lancer Books, Inc., 1967.

1960 cover by Edward Gorey.
Some of Gorey's illustrations are here.

Molodaya Gvardiya, Moscow, 1956, Russian

Editora Latino Americana, Mexico, 1951, Spanish

State Publishing House of the RSFSR People's 

Commissariat of Children's Literature, 1945, Russian

1927 reprint in Amazing Stories.

Again, for the complete collection, visit: http://drzeus.best.vwh.net/wotw/

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The Bodley Head

When I think of controversial books in the 1890s, Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray are the first to come to mind. I also think of these titles with a sense of sadness because the authors didn't set out to write controversial books and suffered (at least a little bit) as a consequence of their works' publication. Bram Stoker didn't suffer like Oscar Wilde did, but he had to borrow money to publish it and wrote explanatory letters and apologies afterwards.

When I think of controversial books today, items off the bestsellers lists come to mind and, typically, things weren't so different during the most decadent years of the Victorian Era. At least one publisher existed to cater to the book market that thrived on getting mixed reviews: the Bodley Head.

London based, the Bodley Head was founded in 1887 by John Lane and Elkin Mathews to trade in antiquarian books. This meant dealing with an upper-class literary clientele, during the age of aestheticism. By 1894, the Bodley Head began publishing works of 'stylish decadence' that likely catered to the same readers, who bought their antiquarian books.

Some of the titles Lane, Mathews and the Bodley Head are responsible for bringing us represent the tone of the era, like the Yellow Book, while others were ground breaking in their genre, like The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen. Machen's audience denounced The Great God Pan for its sexual and horrific content and it subsequently sold well, going into a second edition.

In 1894, the Bodley Head published The Sphinx by Oscar Wilde and the first edition of A Woman of No Importance, printing 500 copies. Lane and Mathews would go on to work with writers, like H.G. Wells. The firm was still important throughout the 1970s and was sold in 1987 to Random House.

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