Yeah. That second White Boots one is, I think, based on the original illustrations (certainly the ones in my copy, anyway). I wish I knew more about the illustration history, actually. But yeah, I’m just gonna come out with it: that first one is horrible.

Never quite know what to think about the Jane Austen chick lit thing: I have a visceral sort of UGH reaction, but then I tell myself not to be such a horrible snob – anything that gets people reading classics is surely a good thing? But then, don’t they really want something very different?

It’s a little bit like when you look at how some arthouse films are packaged as sort of soft porn (http://amzn.to/gBWdVU) – you can’t help but think that the person who buys it knowing all about it is going to be put off by the packaging, and the person who buys it thinking it’s soft porn is going to be very disappointed. But then, by that point, you’ve already got their money, and I guess the soft-porn market is bigger than the arthouse market…. I think it’s the same sort of lack of faith in people’s judgement to package White Boots as chick-lit: there’s plenty of actual chick-lit out there, and the fact that they’ve been reissuing Streatfeild does seem to suggest there’s a market for her too.

I remember coming across another Streatfeild paperback at school – White Boots, I think – that was packaged as sort of late 80s/early 90s teen chicklit. So little-me actually got a third into the book before I began to realise that it was set a bit earlier in time than 1990. Which was weird.

Some cover art examples:

White Boots goes glam
A much older Puffin edition
Slightly Marian Keyes-font-tastic

I don’t exactly dislike any of them, but it’s an interesting issue, how books are packaged and repackaged! The whole Jane Austen chick-lit covers reprint thing, and Wuthering Heights reprinted as “Bella and Edward’s favourite book!”… there’s probably a whole other blogpost in there somewhere…

Yeah, it’s quite annoying what publishers have done to her: the puffin classics one I had (above) isn’t too bad but I only found out quite a long time after I first read it that it has different illustrations from the original edition.

The pink treatment is a real shame actually as most of the books feature at least one character who thinks stage school is stupid and would be a really good figure to identify with if you’re a ‘plain’ child surrounded by…less plain, girly children. It’s also just really at odds with the actual content – so many of the books are full of parents dying, war, not being able to afford new clothes, etc. yet they’re being marketed as sort of Angelina Ballerina style books for middle class kids whose parents drive them to ballet on a saturday morning! I know they’re called ‘Ballet Shoes’ and ‘Dancing Shoes’ and so on, but isn’t the whole point of shoes that they don’t always fit?

Incidentally, some time after I’d collected most of what I was going to collect, Jane Nissen Books did a whole bunch of them with sort of graphic covers (http://amzn.to/fgA5Ch). And this one at least isn’t pink, and features the original illustrations: http://amzn.to/dPbZMc