The covers of His Dark Materials - UK

I find Northern Lights and His Dark Materials a really interesting case study of approaches to covering a book/series. Firstly because they're slightly tricky books for those responsible for marketing to place, and secondly because it's been a very popular and respected series from the start so great trouble has been taken for each reissue.

It has also been out a while - coming up to thirty years since Northern Lights' first publication! - and so has been through a few covers.

I'm going to get into the covers we've seen in the UK below, but I thought I'd start by seeing them all together. That is, all the covers for Northern Lights, not the full trilogy, for concision. As we shall see, with exactly one exception in the UK all editions from the very first have come as a matched set for the trilogy (which is not necessarily true of all markets). So to see the cover of one book for eachresiisue gives you a good idea of the full set.

Some points are easiest to spot from this overview, such as the UK's tendency to focus on the alethiometer as its cover image. Again, that's not true of all markets. There's alsoa strong bias towards blue as a colour scheme for the book (the other books of the trilogy are just as consistent int heir colours scheme across all editions - The Subtle Knife is almost always either red or green and The Amber Spyglass is almost always orange, unsurprisingly). and that's often complemented by yellow or gold notes, often on the aforementioned image of the althetiometer.

Now let's take a closer look at His Dark Materials' journey through these covers.

Northern Lights first publication

Northern Lights was first published in the UK in 1995 by Scholastic, who continue to publish His Dark Materials today.

Scholastic clearly knew they had something very special on their hands and took a great deal of care in designing the hardback in which Northern Lights would debut.

Additonally, being the home-country, commissioning publisher, Scholastic obviously had a level of insight and even input into the future of the His Dark Materials project that foreign publishers would not always have. So they were able to plan their first edition of Northern Lights witha sense of the sequels in mind, though they did not yet exist. Thus it's probably not accidental that they used a visual direction which eneded up being able to serve all three books even as the troligy moved into more overtly serious and philosophical ground. Again, not all publishers and markets had this luxury. Some countries put out an edition of Northern Lights whose style would have looked inappropriately childish if matched on The Amber Spyglass when that came out and so abandonned the look. But in the UK all three books, published in 1995, 1998 and 2000 respectively came out first in hardbacks that made a matched set.

The illustrator they hired for these was David Scutt, at that time already very successful commercial artist. He worked in a method and style which was in 1995 already slightly of the old-school, in that used airbrush to created almost photo-realistic illustrations. His work was - and still is - especially well known on covers of James Bond and Sharpe novels. Close to my heart, he did the cover for one of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker books, namely the ringpull on Life, The Universe and Everything. He also did movie posters such as for Absolute Beginners and the Sean Connery movie Outland. Byt 1995, Scutt had already worked worked on some Philip Pullman covers for Scholastic before - those of the Sally Lockhart books so he was on the one hand a workaday selection from the company and might have created for Northern Lights a cover no more striking than that of The Ruby in the Smoke.

But in fact for Northern Lights, presumably between Scholastic's enthusiam for the book and the liscence (and budget, i.e. time) it gave Scutt to really stretch his legs, he surpassed himself. For Northern Lights first edition he created a meticulous illustration of the 'alethiometer' device from the novel.

While there is much imagery in the story that is striking and novel, nothing quite sets the tone of the book like the image of the alethiometer does, at least as rendered by an artist in this style at the peak of his powers: it is mysterious and accessible all at once, fantastical and mechanical. Looking at it one can understand a certain amount about what it is and could mean, but only enough to be all the more intrigued.

Pullman is not vague in his fantasy creation. the fantastical alethiometer is very precisely imagined in exactly what hisoty and artistic/philosophical movements have created it. And Scutt is up to the job of visually rendering theimagined object just as meticulously. The symbols are of particular note, looking just right as 17th century pictograms.

Other illustrators and even prop-designers for the movie and TV versions have approached the alethiometer, and of course I am biased by Scutt’s version having set the archetype for me – but it’s hard to see any others as being quite as true to the idea in the book.

David Scutt's alethiometer has continued to be used extensively throughout the continued life of the His Dark Materials franchise.

It would go onto be reused in several further UK covers as we shall see, but also countless international versions both of this book. Its use extends well outside the book it was created to cover too. Emerging as the most recognisable icon of whole franchise (and that despite the redesigns of the object for both film and TV), it has been used to cover omnibus editions, box-sets and accompanying books. It has been used as the icon of the world of His Dark Materilas in punblicity campaigns for subsequent books, like the The Book of Dust launches. It's been on posters and social media pages and even projected onto buildings.

When a publisher comissions an illustrator for a book illustration they contractually own the resulting piece. So Scholastic are therefore free to deploy Scutt's alethiometer as they please. But I do think it's a shame that the artist doesn't get more credit. I think Northern Lights is one of those cases where you can't quite calculate how much having a fantastic first cover created the enormous success of the books and the films and TV series they went on to be - see also Twilight and The Hunger Games - but where the artist in question presumably has never seen a cent beyond the few hundred pounds or dollars they were hired for in the first place, and barely a namecheck in all the thousands of uses of the image they made to be seen.

Mind you if illustrators are neglected in the credit and remuneration departments for their contribution to launching a book (and wider media franchise), they do marginaly better than cover designers. Scutt's dawing/painting is beautiful but credit belongs equally to the designer whose comissioned him; vision the cover was, whose feedback will have shaped the image, and whose boldness of design they no doubt had to fight for. They will have been an in-house designer for Scholastic, and those generally don't get credited anywhere. I have no idea who designed this cover.

Whoever they were, they trusted to the strength of the image as so conceptually and visually strong that to include any of the conventional cover elements would only weaken it. No title, no by-line.

The only element besides the alethiometer on this original cover is a tagline - still quite an unusual device on 1995 book covers, though these days quite ubiquitous. This adds a helpful note of danger and adventure to those of beauty, novelty, richness and mystery already covered by the alethiometer illustration.

And this as I say is the format that Scholastic stuck to for the publication of The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass in 1998 and 200 respectivsly.

But before The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass were ever published, specifically in 1996, it was time for Northern Lights to come out in paperback. And despite all I've said about Scholastic sticking to their design direction across all the hardbacks, the paperback didn't retain illustration, illustrator, design direction or subect.

That doesn't indicate a failing on either the hardback design's or paperback design's part though - rather that hardbacks and paperbacks have different jobs to do and different evinronments to contend with.

In the UK at least, there is generally a big shift in cover in cover direction between hardback debut and paperback debut. A paperback launch is seen as a chance to capture a second audience who were not necessarily quite spoken to by the first cover. A paperback also exists in a slightly different context.

A hardback is the version of a book that gets reviewed in papers with a little thumbnail by the column; gets placed on ‘new books shelves’ in shops; gets put in windows prominently. The more striking the better. On a book’s first paperback publication it’s still frontlist – i.e. in the charts, on front-of-store tables etc – but doesn’t quite have the support of that first marketing push. Therefore It needs to get across a bit more information on its cover. The book also might have accrued some stuff well worth including right on the front cover, like mention of any awards its won, charts it has topped or glowing accolades from respected sources it has attracted.

That’s the stage where the 1996 paperback sits. This cover does have the title and author on, the former in big shiny letters (and special finishes like this cover’s bossing/foiling was still an unusual level of luxury in 90s childrens’ book covers, though now it’s pretty ubiquitous – the next His Dark Materials editions to get foiling wouldn’t be until 2015. And there's another big shiny element: the Carnegie Medal. Even more glowing, in metaphorical terms, is the pull-quote: “Rarely if ever have readers been offered such a rich casket of wonders” from a reviewer (Christina Hardyment) at The Independent. The team would have had a hard time choosing just one quote to adorn the front, since the book was swimming in it. In fact this paperback setting of this book is able to open with three whole pages of pullquotes of lavish praise from respected critics and renowned authors.

The cover is revelling in its literary bona fides in ways besides wearing the major awars its won and the superlative broadsheet praise its earned. It;s also the design choices that help make this cover feel grown up and sophisticated in a way that certainly spoke to me as a young reader. The foiling, the font choices, even the text alignment, are way more sophisticated in feel than your standard 90s Scholastic book.

(It’s also worth noting that the books at this stage bore not Scholastic’s main logo but that of their now-defunct YA imprint, Point, which felt a lot more grown up).

It would be very easy to have taken all that into boring territory. Indeed, as we’ll come to discuss below (and in posts about international covers), I definitely think these are books that have been respected into absolute dullness at points. But as for this cover, it looks sophisticated but anything but boring. It doesn't look embarrassed to be a fantasy adventure, whatever else it is.

The imagery is the work of oil painter Stuart Williams.

As foreign markets are usually obliged to, the US publication of the book was running behind the UK's. While the UK market was moving into its paperback in 1996, US publisher Knopf were only preparing their debut hardback. They didn't select the alethioneter as their image for this, but instead showed the novel's young protagonist and her bear companion. It's a very fine cover, as I talk about more in my coverage of the US editions, and one of the most iconic of 90s children's fiction and not without choices that make it particularly striking and more sophisticated-looking than its shelf-mates. But its undoubtedly more child-facing and conventional than the UK approach. The artist hired, Eric Rohman, more firmly seated in background and style to children's illustration than David Scutt certainly, and the light and pallete giving 'magical' and adventurous' more than 'mysterious' and 'challenging'.

The different sensibilities can be directly compared, in fact, because at the same time at this cover was being prepared in the US, in the UK the paperback was being perpared and here Scholastic had also decided on the ubject matter of girl and bear.

In contrast to Eric Rohman's more conventionally illustrationy, acrylic-based light and child-friendly style, though, they hired an artist called Stuart William's who is an oil painter and whose work evokes a finer, more adult sensibility. The subejct matter is treated more obscurely - not the a girl riding a bear in an intiguing but easy to prse scene, but here girl and bear standing side by side in a way which makes their relationship and context far garder to guess. The girl with her head bent to some mysterious light-emitting object in her hands, the bear's upright stance and clutched spear clearly raising questions but not proving as much of an answer as Rohmann's cover. It has a somewhat Rembrandtish air, with the chiaruscuro lighting and the Night-Watch-esque pose of the bear.

This was the artwork that first drew me to the book when I first saw it on a publisher-supplied poster on the wall of the teenage section of my library. It was a cover that accurately promised something much more rich, challenging and rewarding than I was used to encountering.

Stuart Williams' artwork has a deeply atmospheric and mysterious vibe. It works upon the eye the way so much of the early novel works; providing just the right amount of information and opacity to be utterly intriguing, which much remsins tantalisingly cast in darkness.

It's the edition I spent a week's pocket money to buy even after I had already read the book as a library loan. It's the edition I took when I had the chance to go to a signing in the mid 2000s depite it by then being rather battered. I adore it.

However, for all its merits the design wasn't matched with Stuart-Williams-illustrated editions of The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass when their turns came for paperback, and it was replaced itself by 1998.

The commercial years

Again, the cover's relatively quick replacement is not an indication of failure. This is the common final leg of a book’s journey through its first years. I've talked about how a novel's first couple of years see it progress through being the striking debut hardback, able to grab attention from a platform of window and front-of-shop displays and review columns. And then how a debut paperback has some of the same new book/'frontlist' advantages but also has a chance to scoop up a secondary audience by shifting focus somewhat. The final stage is the 'backlist paperback'; the book that has to exist as just another book on the shelves, no longer in any way showcased. Any zeitgeist or popular conversation is moving on, leaving a book to stand completely on its own legs, able to sell itself by itself to the browser that happens to pick it up context-free. Even a pupular book which seems to have legs is going to vastly slow down in sales past its first year in paperback, and that means behind the scenes there's not going to be much as budget allocated to a new cover. So you often see a rejigged design bit not necessarily totally new cover illustration.

In this case, Scholastic decided they already had the right graphic in the bank to work for the 'backlist paperback' era, but it wasn't Stuart William's girl-and-bear painting – it was David Scutt’s alethiometer. By this time, 1998, Thee Subtle Knife had been come out and it cthat was of course with its own David Scutt cover. His illustration for that book was every bit as strong as his alethiometer and the look was fresh in audiences' minds from that publication. So returning to the Scutt illustrations for the paperbacks made sense.

These did become a full set - when The Amber Spyglass came to paperback in 2001 it got a matching cover.

Scholastic hired design studio Black Sheep, who designed covers that placed Scutt’s illustrations amongs more conventional cover apparatus – title, byline, pull-quote – than the hardbacks had seen, and added in some graphic elements to convey a little more information about setting and even genre.

The look is still sophisticated, relatively easy to mistake for mainstream literary adult fiction of the time. The espense of bossing and foiing is gone for now, but the palette choices make that look classy rather than cheap. As a 'backlist paperback' design, these would have been intended to last and they certainly did, with these remaining the standard covers from 1998 until 2006 meaning that the Northern Lights cover was on shelves for eight years.

The late nineties and early 2000s was a time when some of the forces that now dominate publishing and steer cover design were just emerging. The children's book trade was emerging as the new powerhouse of publishing in the wake of Harry Potter; digital sales were starting to matter at least as much as physical ones; and idea of author/series branding were getting much more serious.

What Scholastic did with these paperbacks, was create a really strong visual brand for His Dark Materials. The David Scutt illustrations gave the trilogy a powerful brand, each object a unique and beautiful 'logo' for the book. Partly no doubt due to these books 'symbol or object floating in sky' became quite the cover trope for YA fantasy for a long time (see for instance the UK editions of Garth Nix's Sabriel books) and there's a lineage to the iconic The Hunger Games covers which came out a few years after these His Dark Materials paperbacks.

The basic design was rejiggered and refigured a few times during the Scutt illustrations reign. There was an anniversary edition or two during this time and later, and a few omnibusses and booxsets which tended to use, as I mentioned, the Scutt alethiometer for their cover.

But though this edition had great longevity it wasn't the only edition to come out in these years.

The adult edition

As I have referenced, children's publishing was undergoing huge shifts in the in the late 90s and early 2000s. With the cultural phenomenon of Harry Potter obviously driving a lot of it, children's books were gaining a more widespread adult readership. Harry Potter innovated a way of encouraging this market - by issuing its books as 'adults' editions' to be stocked in the SF & Fantasy sections of shops aongside their standard children's editions in that section the children's section in their original covers, thus cleverly doubling their presence in shops as well as overcoming the hurdle of embarrassment that might keep a curious adult from buying the books.

When The Amber Spyglass came out in 2000, it met with huge critical engagement. The previous books in the trilogy had been richly praised, as we have seen, but it was The Amber Spyglass that really transcended the children's ghetto and earned column-inches of both praise and seriously criticism not normally afforded to kids' lit. Northern Lights had won the most prestigious children's literature award, the Carnegie, but The Amber Spyglass was longlisted for the Booker and won the Whitbread (now the Costa) Award - the biggest adult fiction prizes. The National Theatre was soon talking about an adaptation. It was clearly a crossover hit worth encouraging by - as with Harry Potter - giving grown-ups editions they could read on the bus without having to be embarrassed by obviously kiddy covers.

Actually, as we've seen, His Dark Materials' existing covers really weren't particularly kiddy. They were however quite obviously fantastical, and it is worth remembering that in the early 2000s it was also still quite embarrassing to be seen enjoying genre material.

Either way, Scholastic clearly appreciated the opportunity to signal the trilogy's intelligentsia creds to customers here and, even better, get the books onto a second location in bookshops.

With the existing covers already pretty sophisticated, 'adult editions' had to go really hard on the worthiness front. It was time to slap some art on the trilogy!

Three pieces of 20th century work were chosen: Jeune Fille en Vert et Rouge by Polish-French artist Balthus (1944) , Melancholy and Mystery of the Street by Italian painter and writer Giorgio de Chirico (1914) and Sophia - the Wisdom of the Almighty by Russian polymath Nicholas Roerich (1932). The works also have clear figurative relevance at a glance – the eerie empty street for the Subtle Knife, the fiery chariot in the heavens for the Subtle Knife etc – and further context on the artists and the movements they operated within only makes them feel more pertinent.

The choice of the Balthus painting for Northern Lights is the one I’m least convinced of. It’s easy to take the image at a glance for some minor Flemish Renaissance thing chosen more or its respectability than relevance. Actually the themes with which Balthus dealt, sometimes uneasily in his work, do feel pretty linked to Pullman’s, but it’s just not all there to the passing eye.

(Incidentally this later 90s/early 2000s era when ‘adults editions’ were warranted is long since past. ‘Cult’ and geek culture and the embrace of juvenile and ‘low-culture’ is these days mainstream. I never would have expected to see a revival of these particular covers, but that’s just what has happened, with refreshed versions of these covers being put out by Scholastic in 2022. I guess at this point it plays to nostalgia.)

Between the adult edition and the older-skewing standard edition, His Dark Materials was now supremely well catered for in attracting older readers and crossover readers.

Perhaps Scholastic felt that things had skewed too far away from the core market of 11+ readers, because when they reissued the standard paperback editions in 2006, they went younger. In fact these editions, at least in their first iteration, were explicitly referred to in the metadata as 'Junior Editions'.

The artwork is by Dominic Harman, and as we see its use went through a bit of an evolution over their time. They started out very young, with saturated colours and a jaunty approach to type but interestingly, these covers also shifted steadily towards the mature over the course of their reissues. By the final form of these covers, the colours had been way desaturated and the illustration details that most connoted adventure and fantasy had been dropped altogether.

These editions encounter an interesting - well, if not necessarily problem, then challenge: the books deal heavily in animal imagery but it's difficult to use animal imagery on covers without steering into wholly the wrong territory - looking fluffy, sentimental; like conventional juvenile fantasy full of talking animals.

At the time of their issue, I didn't like these covers much, but I've warmed a huge amount towards them.

I think what makes me like them more these days is that in recent years His Dark Materials has somewhat suffered from being treated with an over-seriousness, a surfeit of respect, with covers and adaptations drowning the book in so much pompousness they've rather forgotten to be cool and fun. It's just nice to see editions which aren't ashamed to be cracking adventures for juvenile readers, whatever else they may also be.

I have another reason that I'm retrospectively slightly fond of this edition, which is that I really didn't like the covers that eventually replaced them in 2011.

These covers have an unusual origin. For the celebration of World Book Night in 2010, special editions of 25 popular and acclaimed novels were created to be distributed for free, volunteers handing them out. Northern Lights was one of the 25 and this was the cover, designed by Crush Design.

Scholastic liked the cover so much they asked Crush to tweak it for real publication and create matching ones for The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, and launched these as their standard edition.

I think this is the kind of cover that non-designers might be surprised to hear disliked and to be fair that means it's doing it's job; it's working for most people. It’s certainly been quite popular to adapt to foreign editions.

It achieves an overall glancing impressing of 'pretty' and 'professional'. After the quite old-fashioned and slightly cheesy vibes of the previous paperback I can see how this clean ventory design looks like a breath of fresh air.

The problem/s is best summed up by the word 'clipparty'.

Stock imagery is a wonderful and valid resource. I use it heavily myself. The trick is in selecting and editing stock carefully so it doesn't stick out like something obviously pasted into an environment it doesn't quite fit. It's super obvious at a glance that the animal silhouettes are not bespoke to this design but existing stock. Meanwhile the alethiometer without its symbols it just looks like a generic compass illustration . So nothing on the cover of the Northern Lights cover feels truly bespoke and specific.

The other two fare better, especially The Subtle Knife. The silhouettes are still very stocky-looking but a few key details forgive that more, like the way the snake interacts with the swirlies, and how it and the witch shape balance each other well.

The covers aren’t at all bad, they just don’t feel as careful and thoughtful as these particular books seem to merit.

The film tie-in

That takes us up to 2010 by way of standard paperback editions, but we must backtrack by a couple of years, because there was one significant point in the timeline which produced it’s own set of covers: the release of the major film adaptation of Northern Lights (called by the book’s American title The Golden Compass) in 2007.

No one I know really likes film tie-in covers - but they do sell really well. It does help when the poster is good, and The Golden Compass had a poster that looked like a good book cover anyway.

The UK is one of the few markets where Northern Lights doesn't have much history of featuring the Lyra and Iorek pair on its covers. As we have started to see and will continue to, UK covers are far more likely to focus on the alethiometer. But in the US and other markets, girl and bear have been by far the most popular subject - so it was impressive that the marketing department for the film managed to conceive a new arrangement of these much-used elements that was very effective:

The film's title lock-up is pretty and the designer has managed to get on the unwieldy amount of text necessary across without it cluttering up the cover, which is impressive. It's a nice touch that someone has rendered the sequels; titles in the movie's title style. The film may have bombed but the people working on it, including in the graphics department, cared about what they were making and paid attention to the details.

In fact if the same imag was rendered in illustration rather than 'photograph' removing the film tie-in look, but nothing else changed, I think this Northern Lights cover could easily be a favourite.

The Special Edition years

By the mid-2000s we were also hitting significant anniversaries. For Northern Lights' 10th birthday in 2005, Scholastic mildly reworked the then-current David Scutt/Black Sheep paperback design to put out as some shiny hardbacks.

Then something completely new came in 2007. This wasn't to mark any anniversary. In fact it was a mildly odd time for a 'special editin' to come out.

In 2003 Pullman had published the first of his 'little' His Dark Materials books, Lyra's Oxford. It featured the artwork of master woodcutter John Lawrence. There was no wholesale repackaging of His Dark Materials at this time to tie into this new addition. For one thing, the little books actually aren't published by Scholastic but rather Penguin.

In 2008 Penguin published the second of these little accompany books, Once Upon a Time in the North which matched Lyra's Oxford in its styling and use of John Lawrence's work.

So all in all if the original trilogy was going to come out in editions that matched this look, 2007 was an odd year for it. It didn't coincide with either publication and it didn't mark an anniversary. Quite possibly one or the other had been intended and schedules simply slipped. Perhaps the idea had been there for the 10th anniversary in 2005 and the shiny Scutt hardbacks were last-minute relacement.

Whever we got them, this is how the John-Lawrence-covered editions looked:

The above designs came out first as hardbacks, then as 'premium paperbacks' (heavy paper stock, foiling and bossing on the cover, french fold jacket, larger dimensions).

Presently the same artwork was reworked to fit a more standard paperback size and came out looking like this:

I couldn't swear to it, or find evidence of it, but my memory is that this at least started as a Waterstones exclusive edition. The hardbacks (and possibly the deluxe paperbacks?) were called the 'Lantern Slides Edition' and is the first to include a little appendix of supplementary notes and 'snapshots' that are now standard to UK editions.

The artwork is lovely, but for me didn't quite reach its best use on the covers until 2015 when it was reworked for a third time, to to grace the 20th anniversary editions of the trilogy:

These are magnificent.

Like those first David Scutt covers, these centre the objects with such confidence in the strength of the images that title and byline are hardly needed.

It's always bold to use white in cover design - or any graphic design - and while that had worked well on the previous John Lawrence covers somehow here it really works. It brings a freshness and confidence in, eschews a safer dark and sombre palette that is the more conventional way of signaling 'seriousness'. The cover card is watercolour-paper-textured and the lines of the objects are foiled, so the physical editions of these are really gorgeous.

The Book of Dust/HBO years

2017 saw the publication, finally, of the long-promised follow-up novel to His Dark Materials, The Book of Dust. Or rather the first volume of what was now announced to be a follow-up trilogy: The Book of Dust: La Bella Sauvage.

As had (kind of) happened with with publication of the 'little books', the publication of a new book prompted a relaunch of all the existing novels in covers to match the new instalment.

Possibly influenced by the success of John Lawrence as a choice, Scholastic commissioned another woodcut printmaker: Chris Wormell.

Wormell's style is much more precise and close-lined than Lawrence's, with the aesthetic almost more like lithography or etching sometimes than woodcut.

And Chris Wormell's meticulous, dark-toned work suits the more adult tone of the Book of Dust books well. He has also produced illustrations for Northern Lights itself which I love.

But I’m afraid I find the His Dark Materials covers that use his work very dull, especially Northern Lights.

Once again, these covers place the three objects at the centre of each cover and looking specifically at the cover of Northern Lights, I think we see a problem which has come up before - that the alethiometer is not clearly visually distinguished from being a compass, and so when glanced as a small object on the cover its power to intrigue is lost. To me the cover is grown-up in a bad way - no atmosphere, no intrigue.

The spyglass suffers even worse, matching more accurately than most depictions the book’s description of the handmade spyglass than most artists’ poetic licence, but looking all the more boring for it. The colours of that cover though do help evoke an atmosphere, whereas to me Northern Lights is entirely lacking in energy or mood.

I think the staid illustration could be brought to life with a lively typographic direction on the title but that too is extremely dull and serious.

This is, as I referenced earlier, the era of people handling His Dark Materials with such respect they kind of kill it.

Talking of which...

In 2019 the second major screen adaptation of His Dark Materials kicked off, this a TV series co-produces by the BBC and HBO. I've gone into my opinions on that adaptation fairly thoroughly elsewhere on this site. Quick precis: with the greatest respect to brilliant work being done by many people on board, I feel the series is fundamentally let down at the level of scriptwriting storytelling and imagination to be a lifeless and thematically empty rendition of the material.

The promotional material was one of the examples of people doing excellent work on the production, and where the book covers use the poster art they look pretty cool, if a bit muddy and indistinct - a problem that arises when you reduce digital work created to fill billboard down to paperback size. The tie-in cover of Northern Lights is on the face of it an odd choice. It's a visually meh moment which doesn't contain much storytelling or feeling or action, and doesn't suit the portrait book cover format terribly well. But this is probably down to books needing to go to print long before the visuals on a production like this are finalised. There would be limited publicity shots to choose from.

Luckily 2019 also saw the publication of a set of 'Gift Editions' that broke up all this dull self-seriousness, and provided something a child might actually want to pick up and read. A paperback, but again given the 'deluxe-ness' of having an unusually thick and textured French-fold-cover, these were illustrated by Melissa Castrillon.

Just like the ‘Junior Editions’ illustrated by Dominic Harman in 2006, these feel like the publisher realising that the existing covers were looking very grown-up and the core market of children might not be tempted to pick up the books as they currently existed, leading to them commissioning such a colourful and stylised illustrator.

The Castrillon covers go the classic 'objects' route with The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, except with Northern Lights breaking the pattern by centring Iorek instead of the alethiometer. I always love Castrillon's work and these are really pretty and fun, especially in real life due to the wealth of foiling on each.

That is only one of several 'special editions' the last few years have seen. Scholastic has been happily capitalising on the particular attention on their star property brought about by both the BBC/HBO adaptation and the ongoing publication of the The Book of Dust sequel trilogy.

In 2020 we saw an illustrated edition of Northern Lights which has been followed up with one of The Subtle Knife. An illustrated The Amber Spyglass is due in November.

Since I've been rude about Wormell's His Dark Materials covers I must stress I love these editions. Not only do I like Wormell's interior illustrations a whole lot, I find they tap into something very close to how I imagined scenes when I first read the book. As an interior illustrator Wormell's careful, technically brilliant style suits the weight and richness of the book extremely well.

And in 2021 we have had another set of Special Editions:

Like the John Lawrence editions, it's hard to say what moment or market opportunity these were prompted by. They seem to have quite directly replaced the Melissa Castrillon editions, but unlike those these definitely clearly don't skew to the junior market.

They might be said to be a return to the idea of 'adult editions'. But just to complicate that idea, the original adult editions, the ones featuring feature selected art, were resissued later the same year.

If these covers had come out ten years ago I wouldn't have quite the same questions, recognising them as a prestige project. But Rankin is hardly the trendy, headline-grabbing name he once was.

So I wonder if maybe the idea is to do a kind of screen tie-in without doing a screen tie-in, as it were:

To produce something photographic, cinematic, prestige-y, but without actually being directly tied to an adaptation - either because this might lend them more longevity, or because it might separate them from a series that Scholastic might feel is underperforming critically - or just for some rights reasons. That's all just a wild stab though.

In any case, I actually really love this Northern Lights cover. I think what works so well is the particularity of the choices Rankin has made. That's a very specific Lyra, and this is a cover with something specific to say, a particular read, an authentic artistic interest in the book. It's visually all the things I felt were so missing from the screen adaptation.

Unlike the current standard paperback edition with the Chris Wormell artwork, this is a cover with bags of atmosphere too. Lyra and Pantalaimon are almost drowned in darkness, and the light falls with high contrast. This chiaroscuro lighting takes us right back to that original paperback, the very one which drew me to Northern Lights in the first place.

It's surprising how little the Lyra/Pantalaimon pair has been picked up on to focus on focus in cover art for Northern Lights. I talked already about the difficulties in depicting animal imagery without slipping intosignals of the cute, young or whimsical which would be unhelpful for this book. But Rankin has found a way to present this most central relationship as freshly striking and suggestive of just the right angles of intrigue - again, quite a feat to be novel in working with a book with 30 years of publication and so many editions across many markets under its belt.

OK but which is the best one

Well, these are my favourites - so far:

Next time I'm going to go through the US editions!