Ugly Books

I read 14 pages of this book won­de­ring what in the hell he was tal­king about, when finally it said “NOTES [I] See fron­tis­piece,” refe­rring me back to before the copy­right page, where the pain­ting he’d been desc­ri­bing the whole time was hid­den. It was a real trial in ima­gi­na­tion and a rin­ging tes­ta­ment that mine sucks.

This was last sum­mer, and I didn’t get much further before other books inte­rrup­ted me. I’m back into it this week, but have deci­ded to put it down tem­po­ra­rily because that cover is just such a giant fuc­king tra­gedy. Ordi­na­rily I don’t let things like that bother me, but I mean look at that. I had to make an exception.

When I was ente­ring it into LibraryThing, I noti­ced all the other edi­tions, inc­lu­ding the “User-Provided Covers” at the bot­tom of the side­bar. Two of those were this green and blue thing, which puts the pain­ting on the cover, and doesn’t look like shit — in fact it has this nice, vin­tage, first-edition qua­lity. On faith, I took it to be the 1973 Vin­tage edi­tion, searched the ISBN on Book­Fin­der, and orde­red it used from Ama­zon (spea­king of ugly) for $8, sur­pri­sed that Ama­zon devo­tes pages to mul­ti­ple edi­tions of books so that you know which edi­tion you’re buying used.

I sig­ned up for LibraryThing fore­ver ago, but never used it ’cause there’s something vain about manually cata­lo­ging all the books you own for peo­ple to admire. It’s kind of hard to stop once you get star­ted, but I did stop, somewhere bet­ween all the books I love and all the books I’ve touched in the last year, which amounts to very little. Any­way, it can make recom­men­da­tions for you, which I sup­pose would be help­ful if you have about 200 items in your “library,” and somehow still haven’t heard of the books that are simi­lar enough to those that even a com­pu­ter knows you should read them. There are also a few very basic RSS feeds, and even though the sys­tem allows you to tell it when you begin and finish each book you own, there isn’t the stu­pidly obvious feed of “Current Reading.”

Another fai­lure of the site is that, even though you can enter your edition’s spe­ci­fic ISBN, it see­mingly doesn’t match user-uploaded covers with that user’s edition’s ISBN, so fin­ding the edi­tion with the cover you want is just a lot of Goo­gling and guesswork.

Inte­res­ting note: the illus­tra­tions on the ugly Fou­cault cover are by Gene Greif, an artist “whose witty collage and mon­tage album-cover illus­tra­tions for CBS Records,” accor­ding to The New York Times, “hel­ped popu­la­rize retro style of graphic design in 1980’s [sic],” and who, inci­den­tally, illus­tra­tes those little squa­res at the top of the ico­nic Von­ne­gut cover design. But, the illus­tra­tions them­sel­ves not being that bad, the blame should more accu­ra­tely rest with Carin Gold­berg, the desig­ner of the cover, and pro­bably the one res­pon­si­ble for the stark, pas­tel, two-tone background.

Also, I need to do something about the blog sec­tion of this site. I don’t know if it’s the font, or the bor­ders on the pic­tu­res or what, but it really rubs me the wrong way. In fact the whole thing is star­ting to get to me.