ADHD brain (you’ll notice I use ADD and ADHD more or less randomly) decided recently that collecting old books I liked as a kid in sets, by one publisher, was a good use of my time. So that’s the image above, the Signet edition Heinlein (non-juvenile) novels of a certain era.
I found a feature in photoshop that did a lot of the work, and then, spent another hour or so tweaking the images, trying to get them to similar yellowing, trying to tease detail out of the random scans and iphone shots I pulled from antiquarian book sites. I discovered issues with the brand template being slightly deviated from, over the editions.. and I tweaked them mostly away, so they looked better lined up. (I had similar minor issues doing my Amber covers. I sympathize with the 70s designers, using their old, shitty analog tools, trying to get it perfect. They had a good excuse; me, not so much.)
My father read a lot of this stuff in Astounding magazine before it became Analog, issues his mother and then mine diligently discarded over the decades; he would re-buy paperbacks now and then, from different publication eras, and I filled in the missing titles from used bookstores—but always random editions, some very worn, that I destroyed while reading.
When I read a paperback I didn’t treat it kindly. I read the hell out of it, leaving pizza stains and, in older books, sometimes shattering the spines.
Over the years I saw most of these titles on the shelves, in this edition, but never bought them; first of all, I never collected books so much as read them. I was ambivalent on the tie dye illustration style, preferring oil paintings that looked like scenes from the book, if they were done well and didn’t look stupid, or something generic and science fictional.
Nowadays I find this illustration style wonderful, dated, perfect.
Every time you pick up a real book and read it you look at the cover, and the cover intertwines with your memory of the book, at the same time pinning that reading to at time and place, often, the three things merging; the text, the cover, the time of your life.
Of course Kindle ebooks advance you past the damn cover when you ‘open’ them; you mostly see the cover as a shitty thumbnail and maybe a slightly larger thumbnail and then, if you buy it, you probably never page back and look at the cover ever again, which is, of course, horrible, if you are a designer, or illustrator, or I suspect, any kind of human being at all.
Anyway. A lot of these RAH titles were republished subsumed in a single huge, unwieldy, is the word, tome called The Past Through Tomorrow which had a very Meh typographic cover displaying a few boring impossibly arranged planets on a blue field. I read this paperback off and on for years, checking off the short stories and longer ones; at the end of the book there’s a whole damn novel, Methuselah’s Children, which I didn’t have to suffer with, as I had this Signet edition of it. I grew to love the cover.
The Past Through Tomorrow deteriorated quickly, I mean, the paperback, and I have seen cracked and falling apart versions for decades.
So now, I want to have a set of these, but not spend more than five bucks a book. This is only a little hard to do, as I look at lots of lots of vintage paperbacks. And I see… the end of my childhood, my perpetual adolescence, hours spent staring at covers loitering in Economy Books in the late, great, Shopping Town Mall, at first as a strip mall, and then an enclosed, faux village with the food court, and a public library, and the steak house that would be my first real (bad) job.
I’m back looking at images of books I thought about reading, thought about buying, reading the cover copy, knowing that so many I wouldn’t, when they were written by people like me, randos. Folks who wrote a book or three. Who never won awards.
ADD brain, post parental death brain, nostalgia ridden brain, looking for my own future in past brain.
The Tomorrow Through The Past brain.
Burning the time I once spent being mad because many people were wrong on the internet. And still are, I’m pretty sure.
I think I’m better off; but maybe not much?
Glad I found a way to read your Blog/web page AND get a notification when you post something new! I still use FB, but mainly do so to keep in touch with distant friends, which is important, because I have no friends who live close to me. 😉
Glad to have you here. You have been approved once, so you can now post comments without them having to be approved by me. You are part of the exclusive club here. someday, when the virus is less a thing, maybe after we get a new car, or before, we’ll meet somewhere and do something. Sorry I am so lame about leaving town.