I picked up this handsome hardback collection of early Ursula K. LeGuin stories last Friday when I went to my local used bookshop. I was there looking for something else.
I wasn’t looking for stories by Walter Abish (and I can’t remember how or why I picked this up, but I read part of it in the store…I mean I can’t recall why I was in the “A’s” for Atwood or Abish):
And I wasn’t looking for essays by Jerry Farber (this weird mass market paperback was crammed into a completely wrong section—misshelved as if someone was trying to hide it. The font on the spine prompted me to pull it out, and I knew that the guy had written “The Student as Nigger”….I started reading “Why People Love Capitalism” and decided to pick it up):
What I was looking for was Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky, which is prominent on my to-read list after devouring The Stories of Paul Bowles. But I simply couldn’t come to terms with these covers:
I mean, look, I know I shouldn’t care about the cover, but these are dreadful, and it this point if I’m going to own a paper book, it needs to have some aesthetic merit. Aesthetic merit like the cover for this collection:
(I didn’t pick it up because the seven stories are in The Stories of Paul Bowles).
A last thought on covers:
I was fortunate enough to see Whitfield Lovell’s project Deep River last year. Lovell’s installation combined wood, metal, earth, cloth, ink, and more to evoke an aesthetic narrative of enslaved black Americans escaping to freedom by fording the Tennessee River. I will never forget a teenage girl who broke down crying and shaking moments after entering the installation room. Her presence as a witness seems to me, in retrospect, central somehow to the power of Lovell’s tableau.
The exhibit also featured other works by Lovell, including Cut.
Biblioklept 