A bloodthirsty cover

I blogged before (here and there) about The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, one of the classic spy thrillers and adventure stories I discovered last year, after wanting to read it for quite a while. It was one of the best literary discoveries I made, the kind I wished I had found years before, when I was say a young teenager and this was the kind of stuff I used to love reading. Long story short, I made a reading recommendation for the novel on social media and the wife of one of my wife's cousins shared this picture of her own edition of The Thirty-Nine Steps, with this very bloodied cover. And this was a children's edition she read when she was nine! She pondered: "I think the parameters of children’s stories must have been wider then!" I agree, both with the statement and with the principle: I am all for a bloody/bloodied cover to attract children to classics. And what she said deserves to be a great unknown line. As for the cover itself, one has to admire that it is as elegant as it is violent.