Attention obsessive paperback collectors: cool book covers will save us all. So says the New York Times and so say I. But since most of us aren’t ridiculous millionaires who can hire artisans to custom make sheepskin book covers for us, I hunt down cheap, awesome vintage paperbacks. Bat shit brilliant science fiction author Philip K. Dick tends to have some of the coolest ones. Thanks to fans united over the internet, there is an exhaustive archive of his editions, both vintage and international.
Here’s 70’s classic A Scanner Darkly.
And here’s a fine UK edition of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The international editions are especially crazy. Anything Italian, “Hebrew” (does that mean Israeli?), Japanese, or Eastern European tend to be pretty cool.
Even stinkers like Vulcan’s Hammer look cool in Italy…
And check out the Hebrew edition of Valis, which looks as crazy as what’s inside the book.
No, it means the book is written in Hebrew. The language.
They ain’t Dick, but this gives me an excuse to link to two fun covers I saw at a street market in Istanbul a few years ago:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/toddmecklem/3…
Oh yeah, here’s one in Italian that I spotted in Rome, might interest some:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/toddmecklem/8…
I wonder what the cover for Ubik looks like…
That Scanner Darkly cover guy looks like the dad from Brady Bunch when he was on Galactica 1980.
A Scanner Darkly=The grooviest mind fuck of a Sci Fi book you will ever read…