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| The original 1958 green Heinemann hardcover by artist C.W Bacon |
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| 1959 US edition black cover with a white and orange African mask. |
'Well, this book is beautiful . . . , that's what I think. I think, with this edition, this book has arrived after a long journey, and has made it to the end ... It's a good book, and it's how books should be. This is how they used to be, and I'm happy for the book.'The interview is really fascinating, but sadly not available online (unless you have some sort of access to Transitions - it's from issue 100, which can be found on JSTOR). So, starting with some of the covers the Transition conversation focused on, here's a literary book cover tour of Achebe's Things Fall Apart.
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| The first Heinemann AWS edition, 1963, designed by Dennis Duerden. Image via Transitions |
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| Fawcett premier paperback of the late 1960s. Image via Transitions |
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| Another Fawcett paperback from the 1970s - a film-based book cover. |
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| Heinemann African Writers Series cover from 1976. |
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| Mid-1980s Heinemann African Writers Series edition. |
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| 1992 Everyman's Library Edition |
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'We started in 1958 with a blurb about primitive society from the inside, then moved to late '60s and '70s more revolutionary, more violent, more politicized imagery, on to more abstract 1980s presentations, and finally an august world literature treatment here in 2008.'Well in 2058, Chinua Achebe hoped that ' ... references to the exotic or the primitive or the Other will have gone ... and that whatever is happening in Africa will be handled just as something happening in Australia, America or elsewhere.'
