Book Connections ...

"Dudes... listen to this. I just... I just realized that, like, all books are connected. One book mentions something that happened in another book or... [scratching head] You'll see a coincidence. Like... Like you're reading something and suddenly say to yourself 'Whoa. I already read something like this somewhere in another book I read.' Because [meshing fingers together] it's all connected... [Gesturing towards heaven] Like the stars, man. Yeaaahhh... It's all one."

Unfortunately, I forgot what the hell I was talking about the next day. I had that feeling like when an angel tells you the meaning of life and then you forget it. Like you might have been onto something huge but your tiny brain can't really process/posess it.

I read a lot of travel books and I love to read accounts of the same region / country from the perspective of 19th century imperial explorers and their modern equivalents. That's an example, obviously, not an absolute.

https://kbimages1-a.akamaihd.net/ae8cd694-1ef8-4da5-8a68-b0f3757ca70a/353/569/90/False/small-pleasures-1.jpg

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41r+7P9HdDL.jpg

(i think we've discussed the homogenisation of book covers somewhere and someone on twitter recently said it might be because covers are usually now seen an inch high on amazon.com and have to be obvious at that size but this feels different. even the way that some of the white text occluded by the picture is the same)

I picked up Ringolevio by Emmett Grogan because it had a similar cover to Henri Charriere's Banco and Papillon so it seems that some publishing houses at least had some design themes for genres. I think both were classed under crime at the time, this being like a late 60s or early 70s release of both.
Think it may have just been chance what I was seeing at the time since both turned up in charity or cheap bookshops in Dublin in the early 90s. But I think both were same publishing house releases at roughly the same time.
Good find anyway since i don't think I'd heard of the book before. Not sure how much it turns up in histories of teh San Francisco music scene . A lot of his ideas got nicked for Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book though which he talks about in the book.