Fun with covers

So I've been sorting through covers and have been meaning to start a thread like this to highlight some really funny, fun or just plain interesting covers.

Like this one for one of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's earliest books. I think it was originally published as Three Times Dead or something like that, but the French translation of the updated title adds that little bit extra.



OMG that is so cool. I've read this one and boy, it's a trip. I love how someone has this raggedy old edition. Taped and wrinkled, but probably still intact. I hope they love it.

What have you come across that has caught your eye?

Heh. Lots, but they flicker by as I deal with the (literally) thousands of covers... I'll try to remember to catch some the next time and put them here.

I've found several covers that I like better than mine - which works for ebooks, but not so well when I have the physical books. Sigh. Not buying them just to get the covers, though Rivers of London and Moon over Soho's UK covers are highly tempting...

UK cover:


Mine:

You could collect them in a Lov Cov collection...maybe.

wow, that US cover for Rivers of London really is rubbish!

I love the King Penguin first editions, like this one



but there are no covers on LT

That is a lovely cover. A whole set must be something to see.

here's a translation that I love. The story The Children of the Corn is part of Night Shift, King's first short story collection. Now it's become Satan's Children! Awesome.

2> The Rivers of London cover tempted me so much that I bought the book, even though at the time I was most emphatically not buying books (I was about to box them all up and put them into storage for a while). If I'd been faced with the US covers I suspect it'd have been a lot more resistible.

I've got quite a few crumbly old paperbacks of things I read and reread, and am thinking about upgrading them to hardcovers. The cover module is a great way of window shopping for editions with pretty covers.

4,7> Well, that's not the US cover - that's the ARC cover, I got it through ER. The US cover is...well, reasonably pretty, or at least exciting (the guy behind the words Midnight Riot) http://www.librarything.com/work/10697148/covers/66568419 . But the UK one is wonderful, with all the words describing the neighborhoods (sorry, I couldn't find a properly large image to see them clearly).

8> Yeah, I'd seen the "real" US cover, and that was the one I was referring to. Decent enough, but not "must have" enticing in the same way as the UK map covers which really draw the eye when you see them on a shelf in a bookshop.

Though there's now a white background version of the Rivers of London cover that doesn't centre on Covent Garden and I haven't figured out the reasoning behind that at all.

I like this one:

10> Heh. Now that one really is focussed on Covent Garden.

#10 by @JerryMmm> For some reason, that looks like a board game to me rather than a book.

> 10, 12

To me it looks like a videocassette sleeve.

I really like this cover of the Narnia omnibus:

If you are of "a certain age" this is very evocative (and a great, witty read).

Of all my cover scans, this one is probably my all-time favorite:

Herewith a recent favourite of mine:

that is a cool cover saltmanz. I love simple covers like that.
Here's one that struck me strangely. It's a favorite book and I don't recall it was ever a movie, but judging by this cover, someone though it should be. The house. The man with the 6 grayhounds. That is NOT how I pictured Durant though.

My favorite Chandler novel - The Little Sister. This cover is so great I can't even find the words.



No, I haven't seen the movie, but I almost want to now.

In keeping with the noir theme, I just love this one. Apparently he's tracking down the kidnappers in Dr. Who's time tunnel or something. How come none of these women have clothes that will stay on? lol



Oh and they got the author's name wrong, too. It should be Ross MacDonald!

I love the Narnia one so much :)

>20 Bookmarque: No they didn't. Kenneth Millar originally chose the pseudonym John Macdonald (in honour of his father John Macdonald Millar). To avoid confusion with John D. MacDonald he later amended the name to John Ross Macdonald and finally to Ross Macdonald.

Kidnapers is that a legitimate spelling in America.

I have always loved THIS COVER.

thanks for clarifying Harry V.

#24 - I love any Calvin and Hobbes book.

23> Is or was. I've seen it both ways, but recently mostly with 2 Ps.

One of the best looking covers I've seen in quite a while is on a new marketing book I recently finished ... Marketing in the Round by Gini Dietrich & Geoff Livingston ... COVER

 

Yeah, that's pretty!

ha! I love this bizarre cover for The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Do you think she's overjoyed at Poirot's mustache or what?

I wish my edition had this cover. I love it.

I guess I'm the only one having any fun.

This image is on one of my favorite 80s pop albums from an obscure band called Planet P Project. I have no idea where it comes from, but it is so 80s to me.

Somewhere I have that album.

Cool.
I think I still have it on tape, then eventually got it on CD (was afraid to play the tape too often before the CD was released because I was afraid it would break), and recently I found a nice vinyl copy so I bought it again. I'm nuts.

Probably my "record" in the "crumbling" department (1928 & a rescued school library discard) :

> 32

No, you are not the only one.

Here is my favourite Huxley novel:







Same book, same publisher, two covers - I wonder how many copies were printed with the first cover before they noticed that something was wrong;-)

that looks like a fascinating book. I will have to check it out.

Here's a cool Frankenstein cover that got uploaded in the last couple days. I like it a lot.

something reminded me of this book I have, and it made me add it to my library:

De Toverwinkel (1947)

OMG, look at this clash of eras!

Of course I judge a book by its cover!

Seen at a bookstore in Mexico City, c. 1982, a paperback with a cover photo of 3 nubile pubescent girls, wearing underwear and posed suggestively around a bed. The book? A Spanish language translation of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women"...

http://pics.cdn.librarything.com/picsizes/d3/89/d389d7a8b609596596b63676877426a4...
http://pics.cdn.librarything.com/picsizes/df/48/df48e13c89950e8596d73676877426a4...
http://pics.cdn.librarything.com/picsizes/d2/bd/d2bd0c32a5b06de596f49676877426a4...

These are three Kurt Wiese covers, unique to my library. His sense of color, design, beauty...

(Now how do you all put the pictures on here, anyway?)

Thanks!

Put that URL into some HTML code like this: <img src="URL" height=200> (you can vary the height to make it look good).

IE: -
is
<img src="http://pics.cdn.librarything.com/picsizes/d2/bd/d2bd0c32a5b06de596f49676877426a41493441.jpg" height=200>

You don't have to do anything to the height, that part can be left off.

Ah. Thanks, PolymathicMonkey & jjmcgaffey.

Here's the other two covers, I hope.





Unfortunately they're a bit blurry...I held the camera, didn't use a scanner.

True. But if you don't explicitly control the height (or width, can be done exactly the same way), some covers take over the entire screen and some are tiny patches.

If they're tiny, putting in a size will just stretch them and make them blurry and pixelated. And covers coming from LT aren't normally that huge.

You probably uploaded thumbnails or something. The camera files should be much bigger. LT will shrink them to reasonable size itself.

47> Did you look at the pics in 42? They *are* tiny.

Well #42, lets see what we can do



Now with a height = 400



NOPE. It looks like the original resolution wasn't good enough to be 'blown up'.

ETA. As #47 said.

I didn't mean that you could blow it up and get a decent picture. The real issue is that those images are too small to begin with if SaintSunniva wants to post those images on talk he or she should create larger ones.

I know it's not the point of the thread but here is a watermarked version found online:


Iceland in Story and Picture illustrated by Kurt Weise.

From this site.

James

We had several of the books in that series donated for our collection (or book sale) in 2012-2013. They ended up in the book sale because the title page had been torn out of most books. I'm sure that this person had picked them up in a used book venue such as a library discard sale. They were dated and the lack of a title page made them not worth adding, but they were fun books to browse.

#53 by @thornton37814>

I predict that someone had written a person's name on the title page and before donating the books they tore out the offending pages, making the books unsellable to collectors.

You might have interest among home educators. Putting them in a single lot in eBay (noting the lack of title pages) might at least move them along.

James

Why would they have torn out the pages due to that? Plenty of my 2ndhand books have a name written in them...

To tidy them up? Some peoples' idea of making a book tidy for selling is...weird. I remember one that was donated to the library book sale - the person had written extensive notes in pen and pencil in the margins, and before donating it they'd blacked them all out in marker. It was fresh marker - could still smell it - so done just before donation. Which made the book totally unreadable, since they'd also accidentally marked out some of the text that had notes closely around it... though in fact notes in a book make it unsaleable too, according to the sorting rules.

#55 by @PolymathicMonkey>

When I was a full-time bookseller, we encountered people who were concerned that their name or another person's name would be seen in a book. Caring little for the condition and devaluation, they would tear out front free endpapers or use heavy marker pens to obliterate the name (and cause other issues).

It is true that many buyers of books want them to be without marks. But it also stands to reason that we want the books to be original and complete as well. Pulling pages does not meet this goal.

James

>57 Keeline: What would you have suggested in such a case? I mean, would there have been something better to do to obscure the name, or is the answer to just not donate the books for others to sell?

Also, it doesn't matter which of the bookstores on Adams it was...I loved it when I was in high school at OLP. I used to take the bus down to all the bookstores on Saturday afternoons with babysitting money, and fill up a backpack with used books from the dozen or so stores that were there at the time.

#58 by @bestem>

If a name must be removed due to a heightened desire for privacy and you still want to sell the books, there are some methods that can be used.

For pencil the white soft plastic Staedtler Mars eraser can be used to gently remove the marks. I routinely use the long white erasers of this type in a click holder. I have also used the same material in a motorized holder.

For many other marks it sometimes pays to paint with rubber cement, let it dry, and roll off a layer with one's finger. This method requires patience and a number of applications.

Fine sandpaper (say 400 or higher grit) can also be used to remove some marks.

The person who is satisfied with tearing out endpapers and title pages probably won't ask or use the above methods, however.

When it comes to reading copies, people don't really care that someone's name is in the book. In some cases, a name in a book can lead to clues of provenance and association that can be quite interesting.

James
(I was the manager of The Prince and the Pauper Collectible Children's Books at 32nd and Adams to address your other comment).

When I write, in a thickish soft pencil, the date and amount paid somewhere inconspicuous, like on the inside of a flap, or bottom of an end paper, does that make it undesireable, and should it be noted when selling? Or should I even remove it just to be sure when selling?

No writing in a book is desirable, who'd ever think otherwise? Unless it's an author signature, of course. If you have any notion that something may not be a forever book, why deface it? Wouldn't it make more sense to write that sort of thing in a computer document, anyway? At least pencil can mostly be removed, though you're generally always left with at least a trace of it.

I'm flabbergasted that anyone would think ripping out pages is an okay thing to do! Sure, no one wants to buy a defaced book but, if it's otherwise in good quality, and not some collector's type item that is severely tarnished by such a thing, most of us will still buy it because it's a good deal. But I'd sure as hell never buy a book with pages ripped out! I'm floored anyone would think any seller would accept such a thing. Please tell me these only wind up in library sales, and not actual 2ndhand shops, that no retail seller would actually give someone money back for such an item and put it on their shelves for sale??

When my family gives gifts of books, we write a note on the front page with our name, date and why we picked that book for the person.

#61 by @PolymathicMonkey>

There are exceptions when a marked up book may be important and valuable.

The 20th Century trend in collecting shifted towards obtaining the earliest copies possible ("first printings") in pristine, unread condition. When it comes to modern and hyper-modern books, this is still very important.

While an unread first printing is an ideal, if a book became popular, the chances of it being unread diminish. Similarly, if the author and book only later became famous, finding one of the hundreds or small thousands of copies sold in the initial offering can be quite difficult.

It is important, as a collector, to determine what you can realistically find and afford. A first printing of Where the Wild Things Are may be desirable because you loved the book as a kid. But are you prepared to pay $5,000 to $10,000 to get one in collectible condition? For some books that are available in very small numbers, it may be necessary to accept lesser condition to find the book at all. Upgrading later on is always an option.

In the 19th Century many collectors placed importance on the "best" edition of a work over the earliest one. Early copies may have typographical errors (sometimes useful for first printing or issue identification and therefore called "points of issue" or simply "points") that are corrected in later printings or editions. Many of these collectors prized superior typesetting, binding, and large paper editions with broad margins.

While the unmarked book is the apparent ideal today, consider some alternate examples, some of which have distinct value. In the art collecting world, provenance or the chain of ownership, is important to the value. (However, just try to get an auction house to provide any information on the most recent owner, let alone past ones).

In books there are people who collect book plates either for their design or as indicators of ownership in a significant library.

There is also the type of book called an "association copy" where the author (or another important person) presents the book to another important person (relative, business associate, dedicatee, etc.). Without ownership marks, this kind of association is not possible. Recently the Caxton Club published a book called Other People's Books that profiles many examples from private and institutional collections. The essays in this book make for fascinating reading.

We have some Edward Stratemeyer association copies. He didn't like to sign books for the general public. He would sometimes sign for family or friends, people he met on trips, and fellow authors with whom he would exchange signed books. The result is that there are very few signed Edward Stratemeyer books in collections. We have a few, including two that were presented to George Waldo Browne, a fellow author who wrote a couple books for his Stratemeyer Syndicate.

Related to this is "marginalia," a term that describes the writings inside a book as a reader recorded their thoughts and interacted with the author's text. Of course, like the ownership associations, who has done the writing in the book is important. Was s/he important in the field? In other words, a college textbook with 75% of every paragraph highlighted is not the same thing.

An example of this is an otherwise ordinary and valueless copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. We obtained this along with a lifetime collection of Jules Verne material from Ron Miller, a noted Vernian and Hugo award winning professional illustrator of science fiction and space art. He used this copy to create his corrected and restored translation of the text to go with his highly illustrated copy for Unicorn Press in 1988. As such, the extensive annotations on nearly every page are evidence of his process in creating the translation. This is a case where it would be nice if multiple photos of a book were possible in an LT entry.

Marginalia and Association Copies are two examples where the collector or bookseller needs to do research to find out if the people involved are important to society at large or the particular book. Sometimes a Google search will work but other times work with genealogical and newspaper databases is required. Sometimes it is obvious but quite often it is subtle. This is one reason why a marked up book may bear a closer examination to see just who did that, if possible.

James

For me, Marginalia : readers writing in books was an eye opener. I can recommend it.

>63 Morphidae: But then you'd presumably keep such a gift, no?

>61 .Monkey.: If you have any notion that something may not be a forever book, why deface it?

I have books from my mother, and my children will have books from me, there are no books that are not for ever.

I am also talking about books bought as new in the last 25 years, just to clarify. And I exclude my signed Pratchetts and Gaimans. But when I ever get another chance to get Neil to sign a few books, some will have already something small noting the date and price of purchase. It has helped me remember things from days gone by multiple times.

I also deliberately do not use a pen or marker or sharp pencil, as they definitely leave marks.

For the books friends and family give to our children I've also come to accept they write things in them. I did cringe when one couple wrote on the back cover in ballpoint though. That book has now lost its printed cover because it wasn't up to my daughters standards, leading me to the observation that the book was as broken as the relationship of the couple that gave it...

@keeline - is there a difference in worth or appreciation between a generic dedication - 'for john' autograph - and a more personal dedication - 'keep away from water, john, it's dangerous (and some more)- autograph, and just an autograph?

It's worth less if it's personalized (unless it was to some other famous person, of course). That's why you see people buying a bunch of autograph tickets at conventions and whatever and just having the person sign them, not personalized. Those people are looking to sell the signature. Personally I'm always disappointed when anyone doesn't at least want my name to write it out just "to" me, if nothing more, because as a personal collector it gives it less value to me.

#68 by @JerryMmm>

keeline - is there a difference in worth or appreciation between a generic dedication - 'for john' autograph - and a more personal dedication - 'keep away from water, john, it's dangerous (and some more)- autograph, and just an autograph?

This is a matter of opinion and perspective. What you are describing is the difference between "signed" (autograph only) and "inscribed" ("to XXX" or with another message). This is different from the special case of the "association copy" where the author signs a book to someone known to him/her and the latter person is of interest because of their connection to the author, artist, publisher, or book.

I think authors signing books at a bookstore sense when the books being signed are merely for resale vs. something where a person wants to keep it in their collection and the inscription is a means to commemorate the meeting of author with reader/collector.

As you meet authors and artists and have items signed, you need to ask yourself if this is an item for your collection that you will treasure of if you are primarily concerned with the later retail value. Both positions have merit but the author may feel used in the latter case, especially if they are not selling a copy of the book "today" but the person has merely offered up a book purchased some time ago or on the used market.

Should it make a difference to a later buyer if a signed book says "To John, Mary Smith" or is simply signed "Mary Smith"? To my mind "no". However, others have promoted items merely signed. One seller used the moniker "flatsigned" to emphasize that the books he offered were signed and not presented to anyone as if this style made them more valuable.

I did have a chance to get a book that was signed and presented to a person I didn't like very much at the time. As such, I didn't buy the book. Now, I think I should have set that bias aside because it would have been nice to have a book with that now-deceased author's signature.

In my world of juvenile series books, signatures found in books have particular problems because so many pseudonyms are used. If a Ted Scott or Hardy Boys volume has merely "Frank W. Dixon" in it, who put pen or pencil to paper? In the linked page went into some detail on this some years back and it might be of interest so some reading this thread which has so far deviated from the original.

To make things even more complicated, if that was possible, consider the examples of books I have that are signed by Edward Stratemeyer, not with his full name (best for many people) but with a simple inscription of "Uncle Ed". From one source I bought several books from a family that was friends with Stratemeyer, a surname I knew about from the correspondence files. Some books were signed in full while others were signed merely "Uncle Ed." I know the connection and it makes it special but to another, it might not be as valuable.

James