Books in stitches

    Penguin have just released their Penguin By Hand collection, six well-loved novels by women, all with 'handcrafted' jackets. Above is Kathryn Stockett's The Help with a beautiful quilt for a jacket; it's by Brenda Riddle, and she talks about the making of it here.

    You can see the other covers in the series on the National Book Tokens website where you can enter a draw to win the set.

    At the excellent Readers and Writers Shop at the New York Public Library this summer I bought the Penguin Threads edition of The Secret Garden

with its deckle edge and embroidered cover by Jillian Tamaki. I was reading Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina's biography Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of "The Secret Garden" at the time, and there are a number of New York connections as Mrs. Burnett had a home there and there is in Central Park a memorial fountain.

    Just by the way, I noted a couple of passages from the biography:

"Throughout her life, Frances was known for five things: her unrelenting literary production, which often drove her to illness; her love of beautiful clothes and domestic surroundings; her inability to remain settles in any one place, or even in one country; her wonderful gardens; and in the second half of her life, compassion and enormous generosity to friends and strangers alike."

"With the best that was in me I have tried to write more happiness into the world."

    Would that every writer could say the same.