Artist James Bit felt that his bookshelves didn't have that retro feel of the olden days, when there were, you know, books on the shelves instead of DVDs and CDs and videogames.   So, from his Etsy store, you can purchase PDFs of replacement slip-in covers for your video games to make them resemble Penguin paperbacks of yore.  What they need next are slipcovers to make these NES cases look like Big Little Books.

Labels: etsy, paperback, penguin, video game

The intent was to redraw modern videogames in the style of retro paperback novels; I find that the covers look a lot like old Colecovision and Atari covers:


via.

Labels: book covers, design, paperback, retro, video game

If you're like me, you've bought paperbacks purely because the cover was so awesome (I love my 1960s The Demolished Man) &mdash and some creative types have devised a way to display these works of art as works of art, by framing them on the wall, but leaving them accessible:

(via)

Labels: art, book cover, design, paperback

Yesterday I wrote a little article for Collector's Quest about comedy paperbacks, from funny stories to satire to joke books. It is rather sad that they can be such a huge part of our culture's literary quilt, but they get such little acknowledgement. Much like comedy's invisibility to the Oscars, humorous authors seem to have their day and move on without lasting reward; they don't grow upwards in the direction of fine literature like their more dramatic relatives. Even Shakespeare's comedies are seen as a bit 'lesser' than the others. Hamlet and R&J get the respect, while A Midsummer Night's Dream isn't quite on the same level. But, then again, comedy writers aren't in it for the awards or the prestige. Humor generally has a message, and provided that gets across (even if it's just to point out the absurdity of the culture at large), the writer is pleased with what they've wrought. Nobody in Zucker's team shed a tear that Airplane! was passed over for an Oscar, but their place in the fabric of our culture still happened without a little statuette or arts grants.

Labels: collector's quest, comedy, humor, paperback