Jennifer Weiner has a nice rant — I’d link if someone would tell me, via e-mail, how to use the HTML feature here — about Erica Jong. For now, I’ll just give you the address (http://www.jenniferweiner.blogspot.com/2004_05_09_jenniferweiner_archive.html#108424016056119625)and use it as a springboard to talk about That Cover.
You know the one, if you grew up in the ’70s. It was the paperback cover of Fear of Flying, a zipper revealing what today woul be considered an impossibly zaftig torso. I remember seeing the book around for years before I finally dared to read it. In fact, my first exposure to Jong was in “The Madman,” an excerpt from Fear of Flying published in Playboy. Read while babysitting, natch. (Other things read while babysitting: Most of Ian Fleming, most memorably The Spy Who Loved Me, which was written from the first-person point of view of a woman that Bond saves.)
I didn’t see the “real” cover of FoF until years later, when I bought a hardcover copy at the Smith College Book Sale. It is, of course, much less tawdry, but also less memorable, more dated — busy, coorful, overdone. (I’d pull it from my bookshelves but that would be a) cheating and b) impossible, as the cover deteriorated over time.)
I’ve always liked mass market paperback covers, especially when they’re wildly inappropriate. My favorite is from the cover of a Shirley Jackson anthology, one that includes “The Lottery.” But the cover stresses instead a story called “The Demon Lover” and features a redhead with a frantic look and a green dress with a plunging neckline.
(This one I did check, but after writing the above, per the rules. Here’s what I got wrong: The cover states: The Lottery and then, in slightly smaller print, The Adventures of a Demon Lover. The dress may have been green once, but it now appears to be a dark blue, faded by time and exposure to the sun. I was right about the hair, the expression and the neckline. I didn’t recall that the illustration is meant, in fact, to represent the end of the title story.
This is how memory works — it fades, it embroiders, it misses details, key and meaningless. I know I bought this book at the Flower Mart, a Baltimore tradition that happens to fall this week. Most people buy lemon halves with peppermint sticks, or plants for their gardens. I scour the boxes of used paperbacks. My memory strains for other books I’ve purchased there over the years. Something by Wallace Stegner, I’m pretty sure. And suddenly, I’m a little melancholy, for reasons I suspect, but don’t wish to share.
But that’s how it works: Find the memory, and you’ll find the emotion. The question is — are the emotions subject to the same frailties as the memories? Can they, too, be wrong in the details, big and small, meaningless and key?)
I think my memory may be lying to me on this, but I think one of the coolest covers I remember is of Ray Bradbury’s collection of short stories and even now, I can’t remember the name of the collection, but I remember a tatooed man kind of floating on the cover. The story was “The Painted Man.”
I believe I was the only one who had that version. All of the other kids had the brand new trade paperback or mass market or whatever was new at the time, but my family was too poor to afford the book so I checked the old school edition out of the school library.
It was a faded mint green color for the background with this painted man floating on the cover. The outside edges of the pages were that pinkish color paperbacks had in the fifties, I have a copy of “I the Jury” with the same stuff. The smell of the book was unique too, a dusty and intelligent smell that reminds me of used bookstores in Ann Arbor.
Funny thing about this memory is it sprang two other things to mind. The first is a story I wrote inspired by another story in that Ray Bradbury collection. I remember the first story I wrote in the fifth grade, and I remember the first story I sent in to Ellery Queen when I was in high school, but there was a period of about two years where I wrote some science fiction stories before moving into mysteries.
For the most part I don’t remember those stories but one does come to mind now. I’m not exactly sure if the memory I have is of my story or the Bradbury story but it was about a house that comes to life and tries to kill the owners. I think the Bradbury story had something to do with Lions or Africa or something like that, while mine dealt more with the technology of the house. I think…There may be a Twighlight Zone episode worked in there somewhere too.
I also have this weird habit of pulling books off the shelves and running my fingers over the cover. It’s almost as if I’m looking for some kind of connection with the book inside, or maybe I’m just OC. Lord, I’m wordy though.
Not wordy at all — terrific.
And it brought to mind — by way of Ellery Queen magazine, which reminded me of the Alfred Hitchcock magazine, and thus his anthologies — the Ray Bradbury story, “The Whole Town is Sleeping,” which I first read in a battered paperback with Hitchcock’s head floating on a black cover.
This will post-date me, if you will, but oh, those cheesy glitz-n-glamour books from the 80s! Always with the terminally coiffed blondes wearing so much jewelry it makes the bling-blingers look tame by comparison. Somewhere in my closet (or perhaps the garage) is one of my guiltiest pleasures, Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ GLITTER BABY. The plot’s a whole other matter (Errol Flynn’s love child, hints of incest, tragedy, and modelling in extremely expensive clothing) but the cover is what I think of, that come-hither/little-girl-lost look that the aforementioned Glitter Baby’s trying to convey, but not altogether successfully.
I do think I might have to make a trip to the garage soon…
Then there’s God’s Little Acre (another babysitting read) with the three oh-so-voluptuous sisters on the cover.
By the way, that was a shockingly successful book. Can’t remember the details (!) but it sold millions, set Erskine Caldwell up for life, I think.
And then there was my love affair with Vintage’s paperback originals, in the Bright Lights/Big City era.
Yes, Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man.” I remember that cover. The book’s framework is a man whose tattoos come to life to tell stories. (If I remember right, the last tattoo shows the Illustrated Man killing the narrator, which sends the narrator fleeing.)
The story you refer to is called “The Veldt.” It’s about a pair of spoiled kids whose parents get them everything, including a room whose walls can portray any scene the owner desires. The kids especially love the hot, dry veldt with its lions and vultures.
What the parents and other adults don’t realize is that those are more than just moving images on the walls…..
When I was twelve or so, it was the mass-market paperbacks on the shelves of the drugstore in Woods Hole, Massachusetts (where I spent my summers) that revealed to me that, um, my tastes were changing. I no longer gravitated immediately to the Peanuts collections and other kid-oriented books. Instead I went hunting through the grown-up section, searching for the gaudy women on the covers of Harold Robbins’ novels, those golden-haired temptresses in lingerie and leather boots, their svelte bodies forever draped over low-slung sofas.
I never read a book by Harold Robbins. But I’ll never forget those covers.
lemon with peppermint sticks, third grade fair on the asphalt playground, baton majorettes, puke green walls, under the desk nuclear drills, lining up for shots.
What is so odd about memory is the initial building – is one aware that at this moment, a memory is being built that will trigger the mind-movies later in life? I found this post via a Google search because my teenage daughter and I were yard-sailing on a beautiful Saturday afternoon and I found a copy of the paperback “The Lottery, The Adventures of a Demon Lover,” by Shirley Jackson, so aptly described by the author of this journal. I will keep the book because at the time, I was teaching my daughter to drive under her permit and she had some frantic moments earlier in the day that are reflected by this frantic redhead on the cover of the 1950 Lion Books paperback. I made a memory, not because of the content of the book, but because the cover strangely coincided with her mood and our shared memory will be there whenever we look at this over-the-top cover. I know I will remember this and I have the trigger for memory. Thanks.