If I did a Penguin Orwell cover every week, after a year there still wouldn't be an end in sight. For some reason - commercial, I suppose, though it hardly seems believable - Penguin seems to commission new covers for the novels every couple of years, more often for the biggies, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. On top of that, they have been creative in recent years about repackaging the non-fiction: a few years ago, Penguin Modern Classics put out several big thematic volumes - Orwell on Politics, Orwell in Spain, Orwell and the Dispossessed - and more recently the Great Ideas series has included three fresh selections of the essays with excellent David Pearson designs. The most recent of those was also called Decline of the English Murder, but should not be confused with this book.
The picture is of the first publication of this particular selection, 1965. The painting is by Peter Blake - like Scarfe, not an artist with whom I have much affinity, but he has caught Orwell, or the myth of Orwell, superbly: the shrewd, clear, humorous and faintly wonky gaze, the rather inward smile. That blue sky, so pure and yet with the brushstrokes visible, could have been designed as a metaphor for Orwell's writing: clear as a windowpane, but if you look hard enough you can always make out the marks of his craft. A few years later this was reprinted with a white background, the blue scraped away, and became rather charmless.
These essays are for me the quintessence of Orwell: under yet another cover, this collection was my introduction to him, and it's from here that I derived a lot of my ideas about writing and politics, though unlike Orwell I've always been able to keep the two apart. Apart from the title essay, the book includes his essays on Kipling (another of my heroes, and I've always been grateful to Orwell for making it OK to love the imperialist old git), Dali, Dickens and Donald McGill, along with "Notes on Nationalism", "Why I Write" and a few others.
I've had an eye out for this edition for ages, but it's always been overpriced; last week I stumbled on this tight, clean copy for £3 at Skoob.
For completists, here is my well-thumbed 1983 copy of the same collection (replacing an older, puke-damaged copy). The cover photo is by Humphrey Sutton:
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