Parmenides Publishing’s Neighborhood

Because there’s no better day to be at the bar.

JUST DO IT!

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Question:  What is your favorite book cover? 

Feel free to offer numerous titles.  If you’re up for it, I’d love to hear your reasons, whatever they may be. 

Have you ever bought a book based solely on the cover?

Please, anyone at all, I am beyond curious about others answers!  The reasons are below- but even if you don’t read them, I’d really like to have your responses anyway.

In the past few days it has come to my attention that the majority of book covers are incredibly ugly.  Most of them show a complete lack of care or interest; this annoys me because, really, what’s contained inside is usually of the opposite nature.  This is a stunning revelation on my part, for many reasons.  Were you to look in on me at any moment in time, you’d see me surrounded by a room walled with spines atop cherry horizons.  Pillars of proof and prose, awaiting the addition of new wooden apartments.  Shorter stacks rest upon every surface, recently researched pages resting next to pillows.  This trail of definition follows me throughout my house and a few even manage to travel on a daily basis with me to and fro.  You could make no mistake on this matter; the tangible book is something  I truly love.  So, even to myself, it seems incredibly silly that before now I have been unaware of the lack of visual appeal that most book covers possess. 

But, alas, I see. 

Though this epiphany will make absolutely no difference in my reading patterns, it is something I’m strangely intrigued by.  Possibly because I’m in awe of the fact that I can be so utterly unperceptive.  This I feel surpasses my usual ability (others tend to not use the word ability…) to be completely unaware of the world around me. 

It became a bit of a project.  I have wandered among store shelves looking for the aesthetic attraction - a new and interesting action for me.  I tried my hardest to find books among my collection that I may have unknowingly bought solely on the cover… this was to no avail, for even those that may appear to fit the description, I actually found interest in the contained paper. 

So, again, I ask for your input concerning this tangent I’ve stumbled off on.

Happy Searching!

The Gilded Tongue

By the way, this was the closest I came to finding a book I bought because of the cover.  Because what beats a purple velvet cover?  But even this had content that I liked.

Mister B. Gone

So, as I'm working on recreating the shelves of my surroundings in digital form I came upon this book and I was once again reminded of my disappointment.  Clive Barker has for a very long time been one of my favorite authors but this last novel left me yearning for the pages of his previous titles.  Though this would be a masterpiece for the majority of writers that attempt to be authors these days, spawning from the genius hand of Barker it is more than lacking.   

I had expected to find myself once again happily drowning in pages that created vast worlds, vivid atrocities and gnawing emotion with mere words.  Barker has this unreal and unnatural ability to summon unimaginable things from his imagination, a feat in and of itself just to harness and comprehend these thoughts; To be able to convey these across a blank page, with the most intricate details to a point that a reader can actually invision the very cells that make them, is heroic.  He had always done this fluently and painlessly, no matter how tourturous the events; making him almost mythic.  My eager expectations were far from sated. 

It's just not the Clive Barker of old, to put it simply.  Yes, the grotesque creatures, mayhem and truly original plots are all there, but it's as if he provided half of everything and let someone else add the rest.  He put forth 'Dev-' and some other pen wrote '-il' and left it at that.  The Barker of,the past would have seen 'De-' and created Devinity in his Devil.

Though I'm saddly let down by this addition to his works, he remains one of my favorites.  I can, and probably will at some point, go on for ages about the brilliance of his earlier books.  It would take miracles to destroy the monuments he created previously.

I'd like to know how others feel about this.  Perhaps it's only me.

If you could teleport to any place in the world right this second, where would you go?

Easy.  To a porch Gainesville.