March of the Penguins

Gary C. sent me a link to this collection of old Penguin and Pelican paperback covers.

This is porn for people who have spent much of their lives in used book stores. I once made instant friends with a guy from Scotland, based entirely on the fact that he was wearing an old-style Penguin logo T-shirt. (Don't read too much into that.)

I still buy those crappy orange Penguin paperbacks – it's worth the darkening paper, the small type, and the psoriatic crumbling of the spine glue just to get a book for less than three dollars.

[The cover above reminds of something Sam Raimi said about the making of Evil Dead: one of their financial backers – probably some local used car-dealer or something – wanted the boys to "make the screen run with blood," so they obliged by having a scene in which they actually threw a bucket of fake blood at the camera's lens.]