Never judge a book, etc...

Yes, well, it's all very well repeating the old saw about never judging a book by its cover, but in these visually overwhelming times the temptation is sometimes too strong.

Hence I find myself reading a series of books presumably intended for teenage girls, solely on the basis of these rather dashing covers. That and the fact that I rather like the concept of fallen angels.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that these books are really badly written. Grammatically all over the shop (and the punctuation isn't much cop either -- no wonder the Yoof of today seems unable to construct a grammatically correct, properly punctuated sentence), there are clunky gear-changes and strange plot developments, characters who come and go seemingly at random and, worst of all, a talking dog. Er...

Whenever I read stuff this bad I am convinced that I could become the author of an international best-seller solely on the basis of my ability to string together a vaguely coherent sentence.

Still, the covers of that series are very nice indeed, although not a patch on the cover of the next book:

It's full of rather wonderful photographs of railway-related buildings and structures which have been demolished and is a sort of companion-piece to Gordon Biddle's magisterial Britain's Historic Railway Buildings, an impossible-to-live-without guide to every listed railway structure in the UK. The design inside is not quite up to the standards of the design of that cover, but it's still a must-have.

Which is more than can be said for our final book:

This is actually a rather clever idea -- to tell the story of Britain's railways through the vast and beautiful array of maps that the railways themselves produced (as well as featuring their central place on the maps of, for instance, the Ordnance Survey, from the mid-1800s onwards).

Alas, the design is so dreadful -- it's in one of these fashionable scrap-book styles, presumably on the grounds that children of the internet age are unable to concentrate on a linear narrative -- that the maps are made to look more like intimidating abstract artworks rather than the often glorious visual simplifications they are.

Hm... a strike rate of one out of five is not overly impressive. I really must stop judging books by their covers.