Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Paperback 581: When You Think of Me / Erskine Caldwell (Signet S1839)

Paperback 581: Signet 1839 (1st ptg, 1960)

Title: When You Think of Me 
Author: Erskine Caldwell
Cover artist: [Signature blurred / Uncredited] — interior illustr. by Louis Macouillard

Yours for: $20

Sig1839
Best things about this cover:
  • I know Caldwell girls are typically very "earthy," but I don't normally think of them as literally growing out of the earth.
  • I love the guy in the background. He's like "That ... looks like ... what the hell?"
  • The hyphen on "Ameri-ca's" hurts. A lot.

Sig1839bc
Best things about this back cover:
  • "Living, loving, laughing ... suffering!" Ouch. It's really, really hard to land that Quadruple Alliteration in competition.
  • I'm curious about the engineering on this "gun to distribute bread among starving peasants."
  • Whoever typeset "bum's—eye" doesn't know his en dash from his rear end (-ash).

Page 123~
"They'd never understand what you went through at a time like that. All you knew was that your pal, who had gone through hell with you, was dead. That puts a queer feeling into any man."
One of the earliest documented discussions of post-traumatic queer disorder.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Tumblr and Twitter]

Bonus interior illustrations include stunners like "Josef Stalin Likes To Drink" 


Sig1839.Stalin

... and "Dementors Adopt Potter As Their Own":


Sig1839.Dementors

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've been to exactly one baseball game at a stadium in my life. They had a pneumatic cannon from which they shot t-shirts into the stands, and I always wondered where they got the idea for such an absurd thing. Thanks to you and Mr. Caldwell, I now know they adapted the bread-distributing gun for more prosaic purposes.