Demented Book Covers

Sir, You Bastard is very good incidentally.

really? there was a copy of it at my folks house (no idea who it belonged to originally) with that cover but i couldnt take it seriously to attempt reading it. im sure its long gone now.

― Michael B, Monday, August 1, 2011 12:31 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

If it's the NEL edition it's worth about a tenner (or more if in good nick). It's not high art obviously, it's hardboiled pulpy (and nothing wrong with that), but the characters are great comic book villains, corrupt, violent and amoral (and that's just the cops - boom boom!). G F Newman had some pretty out there opinions (see the stuff he wrote about the NHS) but his belief that crime benefits the police as much as criminals and that the police are just state sanctioned thugs is a good place to start a novel.

THE PROTO PAPERS is really piquing my curiosity, I can't find out anything about it - except it apparently has a similarly demented companion piece, with added nudity!

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/ciu/7d/48/4f66c27a02a04a0e6a55a110.L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Found two obits for Philip Oakes which describe him as "full of contradictions", a gentle poet and a hard-nosed journalist, but neither mention his foray into demented ape-sex thrillers. He did work with Desmond Morris though.

good lord, ishmael reed

A Proto Papers sequel? Verily, the world never stops delivering

http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/images/AC-1603-Fa.gif

http://www.moviegoods.com/Assets/product_images/1020/429415.1020.A.jpg

NickB, that is a picture of a known vector, (the ghost of) a flea.

My friend who works in a bookstore posted this pic on facebook yesterday
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/c0.0.403.403/p403x403/484325_3418425544237_1325474376_n.jpg

yikes!

Reading this at the moment, love the cover:

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/30/64829526_4b9bbf025e_z.jpg

http://www.moviegoods.com/Assets/product_images/1020/429415.1020.A.jpg

This title has been my email address for probably 14 years.

built upon dope and vice

http://i42.tinypic.com/r8sc5x.jpg

Not nearly as demented as the OP, but pleasant to contemplate:
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/8Hhjs9T0e-s2dTkErbhwfsckbgvi-vJLff2C4AdLHPBYytPgcWpxiHqS29IoGBEvtsuxkE8xcr52US8l7tmEYGk-7FfmuPTMXgxi_Qm673U=s0-d

that dog knows what you did

those cheap ebook editions of public domain titles are often terrible

https://kbimages1-a.akamaihd.net/a8ed6d40-33af-4baa-b798-ed918cb61d32/353/569/90/False/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-roman-empire-volume-one.jpg

which looks like a re-cycled Roman Holiday cover

saying "Swamp Hoyden" in a Jerry Lewis voice

i just adore the jauntiness on display here, like this saucy signorina is punting the coliseum right into the dustbin of history. get tae fuck, imperialism! https://www-wikihow-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/www.wikihow.com/images/thumb/4/45/Be-an-Anarchist-Step-9-Version-3.jpg/v4-460px-Be-an-Anarchist-Step-9-Version-3.jpg

hold on, i’m not sure if my enthusiastic anarchist posted correctly

https://www-wikihow-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/www.wikihow.com/images/thumb/4/45/Be-an-Anarchist-Step-9-Version-3.jpg

fuck! okay, pretend there is a picture of a guy who is really excited about the fall of the roman empire

same publishing company:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51oyUQo2EPL._SY346_.jpg

i'm not the only one who's noticed:

https://reprobatepress.com/2022/02/12/the-eccentric-world-of-sheba-blake-publishing/

Yes, they stole most of that from me: https://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2020/10/classics-reconsidered.html

^The original is still the greatest.

:)

the follow up to Little Women has a cover that matches, which is nice. i also like what they've done for A Short History Of England

My hunch is that Sheba-Blake puts really weird covers on their editions of "classic" public domain books in order to sell them to people who know perfectly well how inappropriate the covers are and buy them just for the 'joke' aspect. After all, anyone can have a copy of Little Women in any one of dozens of editions, but only a Sheba-Blake customer can have one with a crazy Red Guard cover. It's their unique selling point.

https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9781248196007-us.jpg

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/barchester-towers-69

https://kbimages1-a.akamaihd.net/20bcf88e-64ad-4591-8dd9-caace4340f70/353/569/90/False/barchester-towers-69.jpg

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/list/norwegian-author-translator-and-playwright-jon-fosse-is-the-2023-nobel-prize-in-literature-winner/KVPWyCKmvsAYiQjbyzIWvw

not demented as such but these fitzcarraldo editions are so simple yet no two of them are alike

Not sure what they were going for here (NSFW)

Joan Didion - Play it as it Lays

I was curious, so I looked this up. Eve Babitz, seen in the photo with Duchamp (it's not the more famous one where you can't see her face), had some kind of correspondence with Didion and mentions her a bit cryptically in the dedication to Eve's Hollywood.

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/08/joan-didion-letters-eve-babitz

I tried reading that Vanity Fair article. I stuck with it for about 3000 words, but it never seemed to rise above the level of celebrity gossip -- and the gossip was fifty years out of date.

Here's the story from Eve, via NYRB

https://lithub.com/eve-babitz-on-the-time-she-played-chess-nude-with-marcel-duchamp/

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50961568-the-hand-of-ethelberta

(thomas hardy illustrated by a robot hand)

not necessarily demented but...
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51IZF4j5QmL.jpg