New covers? Why not new titles?
Alert Janeite Mandy sent us a link to an editorial from Michael Gove in the Times that has a little fun with the news about the newly-packaged editions of Jane Austen’s novels, about which we have blogged previously. (Scroll down to near the bottom.)
Thrilled as I am by the decision to reissue Jane Austen’s novels in “chick-lit” covers, complete with glossy titles, pictures of swallows and silhouettes of whip-wielding dandies, I can’t help thinking that the publishers are still missing a trick.
Why have they stuck with those dreary old titles, such as Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, which sound like the names of gated communities in the Home Counties? Why not attract even more new readers by properly rebranding the stories themselves? If Hollywood can turn Heart of Darkness into Apocalypse Now, surely a truly 21st-century publisher can do better than reissue a tale of late-flowering lust with the dreary single-word title Persuasion?
So, how about renaming Emma Confessions of a Toffaholic, reissuing Pride and Prejudice as Bad Heir Day, turning Mansfield Park into The Plain Girl’s Guide to Having it All, making Sense and Sensibility into Divine Secrets of the OK-Yah Sisterhood, selling Northanger Abbey as Catherine Morland and the Overactive Imagination and attracting a whole new audience to Persuasion by pitching it as The Private Pleasures of Navel Contemplation?
Most excellent snark, sir; but wouldn’t that be Naval Contemplation?
January 22nd, 2006 at 7:29 am
That was fabulous!! And Bad Heir Day is hilarious. I think he did mean to write “navel” as a play on words.