books i am throwing away

[Removed Illegal Image]

don marquis, archy & mehitabel

i guess the first couple you read are funny

bah, the image had square brackets in the filename. here is a picture of archy and mehitabel by george herriman instead:

http://www.krazy.com/images/mehitabel_cleo.gif

http://www.nobel-winners.com/Literature/thomas_stearns_eliot.jpg

e. martin browne, the making of t.s. eliot's plays

i don't care how many lunches the two of you had

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n4/n20246.jpg

a world of difference by the Movement poet (i think) and later-to-be-a-respected-historian robert conquest

CHAPTER ONE

Plunge, lured by a softening eye
Or by a touch or a sigh
Into the labyrinth of another's being.

As often before the words of the poet went through Martin Stahlberg's head. This time he smiled to think that the plunge, toward the waiting Mireille, was quite literal. His altitude was about eight hundred kilometres.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/417W7WGSPKL._SS500_.jpg

emily barton, the testament of yves gundron

first chapter is surprisingly affecting fantastic fiction about a man in a bizarrely syncretic serfdom-era society inventing the plough. in the second character the 20th-century anthropologist arrives, says, "it's like they're in a renfair — only they're not": from here on this novel goes downhill

was it "blessedly postironic"

along with not eating meat and not smoking, one of my ex-post-facto new year's resolutions this year is "not having a ridiculous number of books i am never going to bother reading" lying around the house. i think the goal is to throw away half of my unread books by december. it's a little daunting, i have a lot of unread books.

xpost i think that was actually the problem with it, tbh pynchon cover quotes are tending to be a must-to-avoid

"not having a ridiculous number of books i am never going to bother reading" lying around the house

I must get on and clear away all the rock star bios and outdated IT books (Win2K Server study guide at £40, hardly used it, FFS IT books are expensive) that I'm never going to read again.

I am lucky. The insatiable maw of the Powell's Books juggernaut swallows many of the books I no longer wish to own and they pay me for them, even. What Powell's spits back at me goes to the charity shop nearby. Only the most broken-backed, disintegral, or disgusting get trashcanned.

Outdated tech books, especially IT-stylee, are a special case of hopelessness, but they can always be dumped in the FREE box at Powell's Technical Books, where some haggard looking youth in broken specs may paw among them.

I'm trying to get my shit together enough to work out how to sell books on ebay, but am slowed down by the suspicion that nobody will buy them. A workmate sold 6 of her books over the weekend, but they were Jodi Picoults. My unwanteds are more obscure.

Go on, James? What you got?

where some haggard looking youth in broken specs may paw among them

I used to be that haggard looking youth! There seems to be a "zone of uselessness" with IT books. More than 5 years old = waste of space, get rid of it. But more than 15 years old = "hey this book covers useful information that's impossible to find elsewhere". So O'Reilly's "MCSE 2000 In A Nutshell" essentially has the status of emergency bogroll, while Rodnay Zak's "Microprocessors" is like the Dead Sea Scrolls...

Off the top of my head: A bunch of Hanif Kureishis, various crime novels, a whole lot of literary novels from the 1990s that I got as review copies or else bought but have to now face the fact that I'll never get around to reading them, out-dated non-fiction... I'd better go through the pile and actually see what's in it.

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0714507059.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

samuel beckett, more pricks than kicks

i) i have this in the collected edition if i ever i decide i really need to do more than glance at it
ii) belacqua is a weeny

http://premium.fileden.com/premium/2007/2/22/808510/Chuck%20Eddy.jpg

chuck eddy, the accidental evolution of rock'n'roll

a bit like someone trying to make meltzer's aesthetics of rock and allmusic.com serve the same purpose. frustrating.

http://i8.ebayimg.com/07/i/001/0b/c8/b168_1.JPG

muriel spark, the prime of miss jean brodie
muriel spark, the ballad of peckham rye

ugly tv tie-in editions blah

http://www.culturevulture.net/books/images/brecht.jpg

john fuegi, brecht & co.

attempts a feminist attack on brecht's passing off of various women's work under his own name; kind of falls at first hurdle in this attack by sort of taking it as read that they let him get away with it because of his irrefutable sexual charisma

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21qVNGB86DL._SL500_AA180_.jpg

mina loy, the lost lunar baedeker

"O unisex
black marketing Amor
with your intermuscular caress
of wrestling entry
to Felicity's
unsentinelled
Arcana."

with great force imo

http://www.hentaistash.co.uk/redriding.jpg

david peace, 1974
david peace, 1977
david peace, 1980

in the 1970s everyone was corrupt in the 1970s everyone was corrupt in the 1970s everyone was corrupt in the 1970s everyone was corrupt inthe1970severyonewascorrupt inthe1970severyonewascorrupt inthe1970severyonewascorrupt inthe1970severyonewascorrupt inthe1970severyonewascorruptinthe1970severyonewascorruptinthe1970severyonewascorruptinthe1970severyonewascorruptinthe1970severyonewascorruptinth197oseveryuonsoe019e39s

the url for the david peace covers is http://www.hentaistash.co.uk/redriding.jpg but i am unable to open the root url there and find myself kind of curious why this website has this image on it

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n0/n4066.jpg

if and when i want to reread it i'll get a copy that doesn't look like a jif lemon vomited i guess

I think a lot of the old Gollancz science fiction editions had those covers as standard. I'm used to it from seeing so many of them in my local library when I was little, but now you mention it, they are a little unimaginative. Although it made a bit of a change from all those polished chrome spaceships, even on the front of books that featured no polished chrome spaceships.

Yeah, that's a celebratory retro cover that looks like what all the old Gollanczes looked like, as GamalielRatsey says.

I read the first David Peace (1974, I guess), but the serial killer stuff was SO over the top (kids being killed, then having wings sewn onto them, or some such) that it seemed much more cartoonishly ridiculous than the real serial killings of the era, and destroyed any feeling of realism for me. Never bothered with the rest.

yeah, but ... compare and contrast with above cover:

http://www.pkdickbooks.com/CoversNew/SFnovels/FlowMyTearsGollancz1974.jpg

i mean, the yellow is really the least objectionable element in the delany design: it's the poorly-kerned off-center title, plus the individual letterforms in that typeface are hideous even by the standards of fake typewriter typefaces. — also the ugly fake book-jacket flaps (wonder what the technical term for those is) make them even uglier.

i was gonna elaborate on my moral issues to the peace books but i felt it was a bit off doing it in the same post as one about cover design.

French flaps, they is called.

snrrf snrrf