I'm halfway through "Agatha Christie's Poirot" by Mark Aldridge and it's being a delight (swipe for the cover). My preference goes to the context, discussing, and analysis Aldridge does for each work and adaptation, but the book is full of "extras" that add up to the arguments, like unpublished excerpts from Christie's autobiography, interviews, letters, reader reports, reactions at the time to the book's publication, visual and radio adaptations, some of which did not survive, but others that are still available, showing the rigorous and huge amount of work and research Aldridge must have put into this book.
The text is accompanied by book covers from editions through time and different countries. Some of these, depicting Poirot. As a reader that sometimes feels the adaptation doesn't portray the characters quiet as I imagined them, I do understand the resistance Christie had with depictions of Poirot. Still, I find it interesting to see how he was portrayed.
So, I thought I would share some of Portuguese book covers that depict Poirot. These are from the Portuguese collection, #ColecçãoVampiro, that was quite important for the dissemination of the genre in Portugal. The collection has more than 700 volumes and it was published between 1947 and 2008.
1 - England Today by the Portuguese Historian Oliveira Martins (a limited edition), a collection of travel letters about England (London, mostly?) originally published in a newspaper from Brasil in 1892, which I'm most curious about.
2 - A Portuguese translation of Jane Eyre
3 - The Halloween Tree by Bradbury translated as The Sacred Tree part of the #ColecçãoArgonauta that was published in Portugal more or less as a similar collection as #ColecçãoVampiro but for science fiction works
4 - Two volumes titled Facts, Persons, and Books. A collection of previously published (1953 - 1961) articles about literary genres, authors, language, translation, and other book related subjects
5 - A manual that teaches the process of bookbinding