Saturday, August 24, 2013

Paperback 687: The Way of All Flesh / Samuel Butler (Pocket Books 8)

Paperback 687: Pocket Books 8 (3rd ptg, 1939)

Title: The Way of All Flesh
Author: Samuel Butler
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $21

PB8

Best things about this cover:
  • "What're *you* lookin' at?"
  • Her stockings are nuts. Horizontal red stripes? When was that a thing?
  • This is the most pristine early Pocket Book I own—from the first year of the mass market paperback industry's existence. There are two signifiant scuff marks on the spine edge, but otherwise, it's shockingly pristine. Permagloss intact and everything. Trust me when I say 1939 paperbacks are rarely found in this state anymore.

PB8bc

Best things about this back cover:
  • That Shaw quote is one of the best things I've ever seen printed on a back cover. The literary equivalent of "this is why we can't have nice things."
  • "Now Ready." It's so adorable how *new* the paperback was at this point. 

Page 123~
One would have thought she had sowed enough of such religious wild oats by this time, but she had plenty still to sow.
"Religious wild oats" is not a phrase I ever expected to see.

~RP

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2 comments:

Patrick Murtha said...

"The Way of All Flesh" is truly a great, forward-looking novel. Anyone who hasn't read it shouldn't hesitate.

Thalia said...

The ebook is available on Gutenberg. The foreward states that the book was published posthumously, and the publisher notes that the "fourth and fifth chapters had disappeared, but by consulting and comparing various notes and sketches, which remained among his
papers, I have been able to supply the missing chapters in a form which I
believe does not differ materially from that which he finally adopted."

He also states that the book was "contemporaneous with "Life and Habit," and may be taken as a practical illustration of the theory of heredity
embodied in that book."

Apparently Butler held Lamarckian views, and felt that habits could be passed to subsequent generations.