Demented Book Covers

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for about 3000 words, but it never seemed to rise above the level of celebrity gossip -- and the gossip was fifty years out of date.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