Oct 22
Click for full imageScott B Comments: It looks like there’s some serious industrial-grade symbolism happening on this cover, but I have no idea what it is. An albino woman with some sort of aboriginal figure superimposed (or inside her?) surrounded by Fire (and with weird fiery-squiggle aura around the woman) over a background of Earth and Water. It feels like it should really mean something but…
Published 1972
(Average: 8.42 out of 10)
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October 22nd, 2012 at 10:44 am
Carlos Castaneda wants his cover back.
October 22nd, 2012 at 1:09 pm
You’d look like that, too, if it were wash day and an incandescent aboriginal was all you had to wear!
The text at Project Gutenberg. I think the bird is supposed to be Helen of Troy, which might explain the burning city at lower left, but not the pollen grain at lower right.
October 22nd, 2012 at 3:20 pm
Everybody now: Lucy in the sky with diamonds…
October 22nd, 2012 at 4:30 pm
Ancient Greece and Egypt. Now that explains the Kaaba at lower left.
October 22nd, 2012 at 5:51 pm
1) Font problems. Those E’s!
2) Superimposed Dazzle Man clearly has a dangling penis.
3) Does it say ADULT FANTASY around the unicorn’s head in top right? I can’t quite make it out.
October 22nd, 2012 at 7:54 pm
“Make sure to include a highly stylized representation of a man that has no distinguishing features besides a penis.”
October 22nd, 2012 at 10:05 pm
His painting “Annunciation” was used as the Santana Abraxas album cover.
October 23rd, 2012 at 6:21 am
Unless that’s an albino that got shut in the walk-in freezer on the first day of a long weekend while wearing blue contacts, what i think we actually have here is some kind of generic “Fantasy Woman Who Is Special, Like From D&D Or Outer Space –You Know.”
October 23rd, 2012 at 11:16 pm
The word ‘desire’ is on the cover, and there are no visible boobies. They had to put a penis there… if that can be qualified as such.
October 24th, 2012 at 7:48 pm
Kate Moss on acid?
November 5th, 2012 at 7:21 pm
Oh yeah, I can see how the world’s desire would be translated into that picture…I personally would have gone with something a little more subtle though…like boobies 😀
Is it me, or do the flames around the lady look like those outlines of sitting naked ladies you find on the back of truck mud flaps?
November 6th, 2012 at 8:25 pm
Now we can see for certain that it’s “Burning MAN” Festival…
December 21st, 2014 at 8:55 pm
The World’s Desire? Guess The World is kind of a perv.
August 25th, 2015 at 12:53 am
Not only do we need an “Artist On LSD” tag, we need a “Taken From Artist’s Crazy Dreams” tag.
August 25th, 2015 at 2:36 am
@ Anna T. – “Artist on LSD” = “wtf”
. . . or perhaps an “artist not on LSD” tag would be easier to add to the necessary covers.
December 31st, 2016 at 5:28 pm
An interesting example of sexual parasitism?
May 11th, 2018 at 5:56 am
Objection, m’lud! It’s only Thursday, not Friday.
However, this is complicated and WTF enough for two days.
The elongated arms, the giant pollen, and all the elements: earth, air, fire, water, and penis.
@Tag Wizard: you missed something here. Check the upper right corner… Unicorns!
May 11th, 2018 at 6:52 am
Seems about right for 300 pages of Homer (not Simpson) fanfic.
May 11th, 2018 at 11:18 am
Poor fellow, I don’t like the look of that catheter about to be inserted.
May 11th, 2018 at 1:42 pm
I realized, after several hours of close scrutiny, that the flame-blobs surrounding the central figure are actually a form of writing, some bizarre alien language. So I fed the symbols into my Universal Space Translator (purchased from Chinese GSS) and was able to decode the two-word message:
Unicorns!
Penises!
May 11th, 2018 at 1:44 pm
Haggard and Lang must have been hitting the magic mushrooms really hard to concoct this tale of WTF,
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3531292-the-world-s-desire
May 11th, 2018 at 3:14 pm
What a little wiener.
May 11th, 2018 at 3:30 pm
I’d ride ‘er haggard, if you know what I mean.
Considering that this is from H. Rider Haggard, I doubt that any women in the book have 1980s big hair.
May 11th, 2018 at 8:50 pm
If you are looking for this on Project Gutenberg, it is under Lang, not Haggard. I doubt you get the Lin Carter introduction that way, but you can decide for yourself if that is a feature or a bug.
May 12th, 2018 at 9:08 pm
Typical man wanting control over a woman’s body.
May 13th, 2018 at 8:56 pm
@drlemaster: Definite feature. Also it won’t have this cover.
Apparently Mr. Klarwein titled this work “Astral Body Asleep”, which fits it. No idea how or why Lin Carter decided to put this on a reprint of an old book, in mirror image.