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ashleylm's review
3.0
Maybe I need to go into the "writing books about book covers" business, because the last few I've tried have been somewhat disappointing (not 2-star level disappointing, just that my expectations are high and they aren't being met). This tome at least began with a 40-ish page introduction, but it was a bit more about the history of the paperback, rather than the history of the paperback cover, which is a quite different animal.
The contents were organized very strangely, by genre (from my admittedly faulty memory, the genres were regular, western, romance, sci-fi/fantasy, non-fiction, classic, and lesbian (seriously, it was singled out for its own incredibly tiny section)). Turns out that the reprints of classics had far-and-away the most interesting covers--I'm assuming that, free from the responsibility of hinting about contents (we might not know what a Dell mystery paperback might be about, but we should have a sense of what "Hamlet" contains), artists were able to go a little further out on the limb.
But it's all picture, picture, picture, with very little discussion or insight into what we're seeing, why, how it changes over time, etc. Slightly more than the others I've dived into recently, but not nearly enough.
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve!
The contents were organized very strangely, by genre (from my admittedly faulty memory, the genres were regular, western, romance, sci-fi/fantasy, non-fiction, classic, and lesbian (seriously, it was singled out for its own incredibly tiny section)). Turns out that the reprints of classics had far-and-away the most interesting covers--I'm assuming that, free from the responsibility of hinting about contents (we might not know what a Dell mystery paperback might be about, but we should have a sense of what "Hamlet" contains), artists were able to go a little further out on the limb.
But it's all picture, picture, picture, with very little discussion or insight into what we're seeing, why, how it changes over time, etc. Slightly more than the others I've dived into recently, but not nearly enough.
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve!
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