Opinion: Don’t read me

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Here’s a wonderful artifact of the culture boom: You can get a fulltime blog just out of weird and telling book covers. The semiotics of popular book covers is a topic I’ve always enjoyed, and I’ve got plenty of company among lovers of lez-sploitation art, general purpose pulp sleaze and the strangely appropriate dime-novel covers of modern literary classics.

But blogger ‘Maughta’ does yeoman service by demonstrating that the art of the unbelievable book cover is alive and well, and not only in the pulp covers that are such a familiar part of the pop-reappreciation landscape. For your reading — or more exactly, your viewing — pleasure, it’s ‘Judge A Book By Its Cover.’ Maughta culls the underworld of romance novels, TV-show tie-ins, mid-list literary fiction, junior high chestnuts and the ever-reliable pulps for cover art that is so bad it’s good, so bad it’s bad, so bad it’s good-bad, or sometimes just too weird to fit into the good/bad continuum.

For my money, Maughta can be a bit too perfunctory in her japery. I’d prefer she augment her stellar collection of titles with more probing meditations, unmotivated flights of fancy, tangential skylarking, and so on, but for the most part it’s pretty much a cover image and a snarky aside. But it’s not for me to gainsay Maughta’s magnificent achievement in assembling this collection of oddities and rarities, along with the occasional irregular. Dig the three-handed woman in the cover to the right. That I’d never have noticed this mutation if I stumbled across this book in the store is a testament to Maughta’s eagle eye, and to Judge A Book’s value as a reinvigorator of pop detritus. Read on, MacDuff!