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Breathless Homicidal Slime Mutants: The Art of the Paperback (2010)

di Steven Brower

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343716,040 (3.6)Nessuno
A visually dynamic homage to the paperback. In 1968, John Leonard, then editor of The New York Times Book Review, listed the many merits of mass-market paperbacks: "They can be stuffed in purses, left in buses, dropped in toilets, used as coasters, eaten and thrown away. Their covers can be ripped off! Their spines can be broken! To buy a paperback today is to buy the means of revenging oneself on Western culture." Fast-forward forty years. Leonard's affectionately flippant assessment may need to be revised as the explosion of digital media threatens the livelihood of the printed word. More than an act of revenge on Western culture, to buy a paperback may be a means of preserving one of its more charismatic--and socially, politically, and aesthetically influential--species. Breathless Homicidal Slime Mutants celebrates the mass-market paperback and gives it its due. A vibrant tour that starts with books from the late nineteenth century up to today, examining the most popular genres--mystery, romance, Westerns, how-to, cooking, and diet, and highbrow literature packaged for the broader audience--it focuses on the history of the art and design of the format and how it is inseparable from the history of American literacy, tastes, and mores of the twentieth century.… (altro)
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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!
( )
  ashleytylerjohn | Oct 13, 2020 |
The title caught my attention. As a librarian I am interested in all types of books. As an art lover the covers of books have always drawn my attention. As a reader, I tend to drift to popular mass-market paperbacks rather than classic literature.

The book has a very detailed history for publishing in general and the business of mass-market paperbacks specifically. I scanned the text for interesting points but spent most of my time with the book looking at the large array of paperback cover reproductions.

Probably more for book lovers and librarians than the general public.

As the digital age inexorably marches forward, threatening to put the printed word out of print, Breathless Homicidal Slime Mutants is a complete and unabridged argument for why the mass-market paperback must be preserved. -- Book Jacket

Hardcover books looked more imposing; mass-market paperbacks looked more informal. Hardcover jackets were more artful; paperback covers were more commercial. Hardcover graphics were more nuanced; paperback covers titillated by leaving little to the imagination. Hardcover graphics merely suggested the content; paperback covers pounded the plot and/or characters home. …most paperbacks were realistically, romantically, or surrealistically illustrated. (p11) ( )
  pjburnswriter | Aug 16, 2020 |
A nice little cover collection that essentially establishes how the genre niches of the paperback industry came to be created to facilitate marketing; essentially the hybridization of general fiction and the pulp digest magazines. ( )
  Shrike58 | Jun 21, 2015 |
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In the beginning was the hardcover book, composed of multiple typeset pages containing knowledge and insight, tales small and tall, fiction and non.
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A visually dynamic homage to the paperback. In 1968, John Leonard, then editor of The New York Times Book Review, listed the many merits of mass-market paperbacks: "They can be stuffed in purses, left in buses, dropped in toilets, used as coasters, eaten and thrown away. Their covers can be ripped off! Their spines can be broken! To buy a paperback today is to buy the means of revenging oneself on Western culture." Fast-forward forty years. Leonard's affectionately flippant assessment may need to be revised as the explosion of digital media threatens the livelihood of the printed word. More than an act of revenge on Western culture, to buy a paperback may be a means of preserving one of its more charismatic--and socially, politically, and aesthetically influential--species. Breathless Homicidal Slime Mutants celebrates the mass-market paperback and gives it its due. A vibrant tour that starts with books from the late nineteenth century up to today, examining the most popular genres--mystery, romance, Westerns, how-to, cooking, and diet, and highbrow literature packaged for the broader audience--it focuses on the history of the art and design of the format and how it is inseparable from the history of American literacy, tastes, and mores of the twentieth century.

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