This beautiful hardback collector’s edition features wraparound artwork painted by artist Laci Fowler and gold sprayed edges with a matching ribbon marker.

You can find out more about Anna Bond’s work on her website. Unlike the other novels in the collection, it does hold a darker background colour, which suggests it’s a more mature novel with darker themes. The four main faces, Beth, Jo, Meg and Amy, illustrate the key themes of sisterhood and friendship that binds this coming-of-age story together. The colour palette of this 2014 edition embraces the novel’s opening chapter set at Christmas, with warm greens and a festive gold embossed title. Bond has also designed the 150th Anniversary edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and continues to use a playful and flowery style in all of her design work, stationery and book covers. The cover illustration is courtesy of Anna Bond, artistic director and co-founder of the lifestyle brand Rifle Paper Co. It includes Little Women, A Little Princess, Heidi and Anne of Green Gables. Puffin classics launched a special edition series called Puffin in Bloom, featuring four novels that perfectly introduce secondary school readers to beloved classics. To find out more about the Clothbound Classics Collection, click here. This version of Little Women is available in Waterstones. Other Clothbound Classics include Pride and Prejudice and 1984. The collector element of these covers also adds to the attraction, with the cohesiveness of all of the novels creating a stunning bookshelf when more than one is collected.

Designer Coralie Bickford-Smith said of her work that she wished to “hark back to the world of Victorian bindings and a golden age of book binding” and I believe that, for Little Women in particular, this plays perfectly into how the novel makes the reader feel and transports them to the era as soon as they pick up the book. The designer’s decision to make the key image a pair of scissors signifies one of the most important parts of the novel, Jo cutting her hair off, and therefore encourages both new and old readers to pick up this particular version of an old classic. The cover sticks to the repeated image of scissors, a key element of the novel, and creates a colour contrast with the pink and brown that makes for an eye-catching design. The Penguin Clothbound Classics Collection follows a theme of simplicity and elegance, with their edition of Little Women being no exception.

Little women publishing