Dahl Covers

Roald Dahl was either my favourite or second-favourite writer when I was a kid (he and Judy Blume would have been jockeying for the top spot). I obsessively checked and re-checked his books out of my grade school library, but owned few of them. Since then, I've managed to pick up seven of my own--two are adult titles (Switch Bitch and a short story collection), but the other five are children's books, most of them second-hand.


This is what the Roald Dahl books looked like when I was little--brightly colored border, white frame, a cover illustration inset that looked like the drawings inside the book. This is pretty much the exact version of the book my grade school library had. Danny, Champion of the World was not one of my favourites among Dahl's books, though, and I probably wouldn't have bought it, not even second-hand, if it hadn't been this particular copy, and if it hadn't been very cheap. The plot was more grounded in reality than most of Dahl's books, and the poaching part of the book just didn't make much of an impression on me. What really stayed with me was Dahl's rapturous descriptions of the oddest food--e.g. "It was a cold meat pie. The meat was pink and tender with no fat or gristle in it, and there were hard-boiled eggs buried like treasures in several different places. " I'm not sure that description made me want to wolf down a cold meat pie, but I definitely had the impression that Dahl had dreamed about them at some point.


My two Charlie books are not so good. My Chocolate Factory isn't terrible, especially when I have always preferred books with solid-colour borders to the ones with illustrations making up the entire cover. My quibble is with the particular image. Grandpa Joe looks all wrong in his old man's checked jacket, Willy Wonka's a little too fey, and the children are all apple-cheeked and look very (too?) young. Charlie looks like a background character in Newsies who is about to join the big dance number. I think Veruca doesn't really look right here, either--more prissy than rich, and way too pink. I almost always dislike this photo-realistic style of drawing for covers, though, because it tends to date the book as much as a photo would, and can potentially limit the ways I can picture the characters. Mostly, though, I keep looking at it and noticing all these 'incorrect' details, and I wonder why, if they are in the room described at the very beginning of the tour, Violet and Augustus are missing from the scene. This copy at least has the Schindelman illustrations, which are the only ones I really appreciate , and which seem particularly integral to the story, as when Charlie is introduced with a nice little headshot of him inserted into the text.


The Great Glass Elevator copy I own is so dreadful that I kind of regret buying it, though. Ugh. If Grandpa Joe is bad on the Factory cover, he is alarmingly bad on here, with his double-breasted denim jacket, jaunty neckerchief, and inexplicable Colonial American sideburns with bangs. Charlie looks like a text book illustration of a dork, in his brown suit and matching shirt-and-socks. Plus, on the cover, at least, he looks too old. And I don't have the faintest idea why Charlie's parents are dressed like Eastern European peasants. This cover is probably from 1975 (the first Puffin date inside), and it looks it.

The Oompa Loompas aren't as terrible as they could be (and there's at least one kid out there who was thrilled that the cover of the book included bare bottoms), but they lack the character of the Schindelman Oompa Loompas. They're just shrunken semi-nude muscular people here. And I think the illustrator's approach to the sky was a bit misguided here, since this is supposed to be a room inside the factory. Oh, I just don't like anything about this 'interpretation.'

The inside illustrations are the same as the cover illustrations, so all my clothing critiques still hold, plus the illustration style itself is really busy with cross-hatching all over the place. The more abstract stuff--the space hotel, the knids--looks all right, but in a scenario with multiple characters and a bit of furniture, the eye doesn't know what to settle on.

Look at this:

I guess the babies are supposed to be the focus here, but the perspective is all off, and they've been plunked onto a quilted duvet in front of crumpled pillows (judging by the cross-hatching). Charlie's face is half behind the bed railing for no good reason, and Mrs. Bucket looks like she wandered into the scene from The Scream and is just starting to relax now. Colonial Grandpa Joe looks sad and Eastern European Mr. Bucket looks happy, which is just about the only decision here that makes sense, since those emotions are described in the text itself.

Anyway.


The Dahl book covers changed at some point in the nineties, differing just slightly from the template featured on my Danny, Champion of the World. The coloured border is mostly gone, with just a strip of colour around three sides, and Quentin Blake provides cover illustrations (and, in fact, it looks like Blake's illustrations replaced even the interior illustrations originally done by other artists). This series' design is fine--nothing special, but not awful. I do prefer the latest versions of the Dahl covers, which tend render Dahl's name in a more stylized font and provide backgrounds in bright colours, rather than the featureless white waste that looms behind the witches here on my example.