This LOEWE Book Set Will Tempt You to Actually Read 'Madame Bovary'
This month, the Spanish brand launches a collection of classics curated by creative director Jonathan Anderson, and featuring iconic photography by Steven Meisel.
Stella Tennant photographed for LOEWE Classics.
“There comes a point in every reader’s life when they must make peace with all the books they’ll never read.” So begins Adam O’Fallon Price’s essay that set “Literary Twitter” into a mild tizzy when it was published by the Paris Review last week. A considerable number of bookworms disagreed. But is this claim as patently anti-intellectual as disgruntled readers claimed? On the other side of the Twitterverse, the rest of us were wondering: “Wait, has any person actually read all of the classics?
Price’s argument is sound: “When you’re younger, you know logically that you will not, cannot, read every book. Yet youth’s convincing illusion of immortality is not confined to the realms of romance and illegal substances—it informs your reading as well… books possess a nimbus of potentiality, however faint…But as holds true for many other things, these illusions begin to fall away around the age of forty.”
But you know what else tends to happen at forty? A keen spike in the development of aesthetic tastes and an appetite for the finer things in life.
Lucky for us, Jonathan Anderson, purveyor of all things necessary to a perfectly curated and painfully chic existence, has devised a plan to satisfy our need for pretty things, resurrect our youthful ambitions to conquer the Western literary canon, and defeat the deafening shame of having skimmed Moby Dick in the 9th grade.
Today, LOEWE launches a limited edition box set of seminal texts that will tempt even the least voracious of readers. The LOEWE Classics Books set will include cloth-bound hardcover editions of Wuthering Heights, Dracula, DonQuioxte, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Heart of Darkness and Madame Bovary, with each volume sleeved in iconic archival images photographed by longtime collaborator of the brand, Steven Meisel. It is a perfect parcel of cultural literacy—a kind of starter pack for a slacker with an impeccable palate for objets. Consider it prepackaged taste available for a steal (it retails at $590 and will be available at select LOEWE stores internationally).
If that doesn’t get you to read...who are we kidding? It will.
