Title: Bedrooms Have Windows
Author: A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)
Cover artist: Darryl Greene
Estimated value: $15-20
Condition: 10/10 (a time-travel kind of copy, like it's 1963 again; unread, square, shiny, bright blue page edges, ridiculous)
- She looks worried. Maybe she needs Yet Another Cigarette.
- How big is her bed? The headboard appears to start in the far corner of the room. Is her room just one big bed? That's pretty cool.
- This cover is exquisitely balanced and demonstrates a nice attention to detail. I'm somehow transfixed by the latches, like miniature sentries at the bottom of the sill.
- Gauzy curtain, also lovely. And that tension between the tightly enclosed, highly segmented left half of the window and the dramatic, animated, border-bursting right half—love it.
- Ooh, close-up. Normally I don't like recycled back covers, but this one makes nice use of that window gridding, covering the horizontally-lined left pane with horizontal lines of text, while leaving the right half airy and open.
- God bless Dell for *clearly crediting* cover artists more than most other publishers.
- I've written about this book before, in an earlier (1952) edition. Here's the cover:
And the write-up (Paperback 211!)
Page 123~
The taffy-haired blonde who was standing in front of the mirror, surveying her partially clothed figure with quite evident approval, was the girl who had picked me up the night before as her escort, and had taken me to the motor court.
Aw, how quaint. "Motor court." You can do all kinds of illicit things in a "motor court" and still feel pretty good about yourself. It's positively Arthurian. "Casual sex, m'lady?"
~RP
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1 comment:
This has to be one of the most boring titles ever, 'Bedrooms Have Windows'. Why not call it 'Houses Have Doors' or 'Bathrooms Have Toilets'. Did the author even try to think of a title relating to the book at all? It's like he was writing in his bedroom and picked the first thing he saw. Oh, I know. This bedroom has windows. Did no one at any stage of the publishing process even try to be clever or use their brains?
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