After a couple weeks of dipping deeply into the nostalgia pool for BBCDW I figured it’d be a good idea to bring it back to now-times. But not too now-times.

David Carr’s mem-wuah The Night of the Gun chronicles the depths of his many, many years of substance abuse. Sounded like a pretty good book when it came out in hardcover about a year ago. But I didn’t buy it back then cause of a personal rule of mine that might get me into trouble with most book aficionados: I can’t stand hard cover books. They’re cumbersome, you can’t fold them back and hold them with one hand, they’re unecessarily heavy, and if you get upset or dissapointed with the contents therin and decide to whip the thing across the room in a little baby tantrum you’re more likely to break something valuable. Plus this one’s hardcover design left a lot to be desired. It kind of smacked of a little too much effort, “It looks like a gun but it also represents drugs. Get it? Get it?!” Yeah, yeah, we get it, we get it. You enjoying your first year at art school?

Something about contrast of the photos on the cover of paperback just struck me as a little more genuine and haunting. They kept the same hand-scrawled chalk font which was working well for them the first time around. And they even managed to tastefully work in a cover blurb by a insanely popular author, which, in my eyes, is often a no-no. Well done, nameless Simon & Schuster paperback designer.

May 15th’s entry of BBCDW got me digging through all sorts of Flickr pools in search of the perfect cover. I’ve yet to find it, but in the meantime there’s some pretty stellar gems laying around.

Check out this paperback pool I found this morning that seems to be loosely centered around Penguin and Pelican releases from the 60’s and 70’s. Must’ve been nice to be around in a time when people were a little more artful in their decisions for reprints seeing as it’s mostly a snooze-fest now.

Remember that bad ass thing I was telling you about? Here’s the video me bro made for it.

I could go into a whole didactic breakdown of why this is a bile-inducing book cover, but this shithead who’s responsible for decades of shitty music and even shittier people who follow his career religiously doesn’t even deserve that much. All he gets in terms of a critique is this: Given the choice, I’d rather barf up all the cheese burgers and margaritas that ever existed than read this book.

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Harper Collins wishes they had the balls to release a book cover like this.

Last week Keith Phipps of the AV Club posted this review of Theodor Sturgeon’s classic sci-fi novel More Than Human. Before you click through I will forecast your reaction: You will shake your head and whisper, “Damn, if sci-fi novels from back in the day didn’t have the tightest covers.”

So now I’m obsessed with these things. One google search and few clicks later and I unearthed a goldmine of the illest book covers ever drawn.

A few favorites:

Tales of the Cthulu Mythos

The Bull and the Spear

The Beast the Shouted Love at the Heart of the World

Those were the days. All it took to have the sickest job was to have some drawing and painting skills and a shitload of LSD.

After spending a good half an hour browsing these things, the book shelf at your local Borders will look about as stimulating as the pamphlet rack at the doctors office.

Full disclosure: This weeks BBCDW entry comes more out of an interest in the material itself than an interest in the accompanying design, which, as will soon be explained, is not all that great.

I’ve been sitting at my desk all this week (plopped in front of my desk, really) contentedly chipping away at a new issue. Yesterday, though, something hit me all the sudden. Holy Shit. I’m a 27-year-old healthy young man. What the fuck am I doing whiling away my days at a fucking desk when I could be out breaking laws and jumping my motorcycle over gorges. Or at the very least, introducing myself to random women on the street and having long drawn out conversations about life and love, a la Before Sunrise. Taking some sort of risks, I guess, instead of being cautious and careful all the time.

That’s why William Gurstelle’s new book struck a chord with me. Living dangerously reminds you that you’re alive, not a worker drone  toiling away for dubious reasons. Kind of an idealistic, college kid notion, but the truth nonetheless.

The cover design, on the other hand, is nothing special. It aspires to greatness, something along the whimiscal lines of The Dangerous Book for Boys, but falls shamefully short. The little flamethrower man is an almost embareassing example of poor Adobe Illustrator skills and the knives in the lower left almost look like cooking cutlery, not anything truly menacing, like so. It appears they were going for the turn-of-the-century Almanac aesthetic but just ended up with a design hodge podge straight out of Stuff magazine. Hopefully they can get it together for the paperback. What’s that?  This is the paperback? Yikes.

So this thing just came in hot off the wire. The second I saw that it had an MSRP of $489.00 I was pretty livid and was all ready to write some tirade about how Amazon is totally out of touch with the modern reader and that this product could, in no way, be the future of books and how I got my hands on an original Kindle a couple years ago and was not that impressed and found it to be a middle piece of technology on the road to something better (iPhone reader? When is this going to happen? Hello?) and how it should be reserved for late 40’s techies who want to get in early on some hot new piece of gear but feel too old to Twitter. Some angry bullshit like that.

But then I looked at the specs.

This thing is 1/3″ thick and has a 9.7″ screen that can show a shitload more detail than the first Kindle. It holds 3500 books and Amazon is now in league with a handful of major colleges to provide this new gadget to students for all their textbook uses. Dare I say it: this thing is kind of cool.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to go out and buy one. $500 for an ebook reader is fucking stupid, I don’t care how much money you have. But if you’re a student getting one for free and you don’t have to pay an ungodly amount for heavy textbooks that you will use once and store on your bookshelf for the rest of your life in hopes that it will serve you at some later date, well, then you’re stoked.

The concept of an ebook is a ways off from being revolutionary. Nothing will replace a real, perfect bound, paperback book. Nothing will replace the ability to dog ear, make notes in the margin, underline. Not to mention a paperback is never subject to battery failure, blunt trauma and if you spill a beer on it all you do is stick it out in the sun for a while. Sure it’s gonna be all puffy and stinky when it dries out, but it will technically still function.

This whole Kindle experiment whiffs of desperation to me: An ailing company trying way too hard to maintain relevancy in an advance technological age. Something tells me Jeff Bezos thinks so too.

The book is not broken, Amazon. Johannes Gutenburg got it right the first time. Quit trying to fix it.

Thanks Gallycat.

Dear friend Jason Gregory just launched a new version of the MAKR site. Jason makes insanely high qulaity leather goods. If you’re into fashion and hand crafted things that carry other things then you should check him out.

Ha. So looks like ABSPB might have to be a bi-weekly thing seeing that I still haven’t finished any one of the 3 books I first showcased. Looks like I’m not as quick a reader as I thought I was! Heh Heh! Looks like I’m not as smart either! Looks like I bit off more than I can chew! Ha Ha! Looks like I’m a complete failure at everything I do and I fail to finish the things that I start! HA HA HA! Haha, hah, whoo (whiping tear from eye), heh heh, ha… (sigh).

Anyway here’s the cover for Mark Twain’s “Who is Mark Twain?” A collection of unpublished journals, letters and lectures. A beautiful and playful little cover. Though I’m not sure what all that top hat business is about. I don’t remember him being known for that. A head of billowy white hair maybe, but top hat? Maybe Harper Collins saw how much Slash’s memoir was selling so they threw Samual Clemmins on the top hat bandwagon. Or maybe the answer to the titular question is right here.