“I need the sound of the keys, the keys of a manual typewriter. The hammers striking the page. I like to see the words, the sentences, as they take shape. It’s an aesthetic issue.”  Not many people will have as sensory and physical a relationship with their keyboard as one of our favourite writers Don DeLillo.

He’s quoted in this Guardian article that looks at the future of publishing, e-books and reading and the blurring of lines between our ‘real’ lives and our digital ones.

The article is oddly apocalyptic in its view of the future of good writing but it raises some interesting questions to think over … I don’t know if I prefer reading from paper pages to reading from a screen, but there is something to be said for standing in front a shelf of familiar books, running your eyes aross the titles and authors on the spines and letting the fonts and colours and design of the cover help shape your memories and emotions as you work out what to read next.

For a while now Penguin has been re-releasing some of its classic titles with new covers designed by top comic and graphic artists. They do about six new titles a year this way. The art can at first, for a beloved classic, be disconcerting, then eye-opening and the effect is often startling.

Check them out here (to see them best, click on a picture then select All Sizes, then Original), and here’s an interview with Penguin (US) art director Paul Buckley about the work.