Three Books

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. Hardback. A Doubleday “Book Club Edition.” No clear date of publication, but the jacket design is by Johannes Regn. This book was my father’s. I’ve only kept it because of the cover. I keep it facing out, covering the broken spines of other Asimov novels I’ll never read again.

Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1909-1945 by Gertrude Stein (edited by Patricia Meyerowitz. A Penguin Modern Classics trade paperback edition, printed in 1984 (I think) in Great Britain (I think–the colophon is confusing as hell). The cover features a detail from Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair. I spent 10 minutes flicking through Phil Baines’s Penguin by Design but couldn’t determine the designer. The first page bears two bookstore stamps, one from Russakoff’s Bookstore in Philadelphia, and one from the bookstore where I bought it. This is a book one can just pick up and read and random and be rewarded. I’m always reading bits of it so it’s never shelved.

The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard. A 2010 first edition trade paperback by Vintage International. The cover design is by Eva Brandstotter, who designed all of these Bernhard editions for Vintage. I was lucky enough to scoop up five TB’s all at once at my favorite used bookstore. I’ve had the urge to read Thomas Bernhard but it’s still too damn hot here in swampy muggy humid Florida to read Thomas Bernhard which I think only makes sense, this sentiment I’ve just expressed, if you’ve actually read Thomas Bernhard.