Jul 05
Tat Wood Comments: Amazingly, this is about the most tasteful cover for this I’ve seen. The original hardback had a 90% return rate, which makes sense when you see what they put on it.
Published 1981
Tat Wood Comments: Amazingly, this is about the most tasteful cover for this I’ve seen. The original hardback had a 90% return rate, which makes sense when you see what they put on it.
Published 1981
July 5th, 2013 at 9:54 am
When Elton John met Robert Mapplethorpe: whoever wins, we lose.
July 5th, 2013 at 11:06 am
I think I prefer the hardback version, despite its early depiction of Alan Partridge.
July 5th, 2013 at 12:02 pm
Both covers are horrid, actually. But to be fair, it must have been pretty hard for the artists to come up with anything that would go with an awful title like that. At least this version tries to bury it, instead of featuring it in huge curly lettering over the head of The Boy Who Could Fly.
July 5th, 2013 at 12:45 pm
DAD????
July 5th, 2013 at 1:46 pm
Hmmm. Apparently it actually IS a crime to wear an outfit like that. Unless the manacles and steel collar are accessories.
July 5th, 2013 at 2:09 pm
Straight from the catwalk: the Spring 1981 Frontal Lobotomy Collection.
July 5th, 2013 at 2:29 pm
I wish the font was much larger. And in front of the cover art.
July 5th, 2013 at 3:10 pm
When your body is 90% neck and wrists, you’ve got to dress pretty flamboyantly to distract people from it.
July 5th, 2013 at 3:35 pm
This book is really pushing the “dont judge a book by its cover” saying…….having said that i refuse to read it.
“A Time for Dragons” now THAT’S a friggin cover!! 🙂
July 5th, 2013 at 3:38 pm
Judge Dredd meets Zoolander!
July 5th, 2013 at 6:01 pm
I thought the “Alan Partridge” cover was mostly harmless. On the other hand, it has a blurb quote which describes the author as “flamboyant.” Nudge nudge, wink wink.
July 5th, 2013 at 6:26 pm
Beats the hell out of an orange jumpsuit in the prison garb conspicuosity department.
July 5th, 2013 at 8:53 pm
@Rachel J 3—the book was actually planned to be a learned monograph on McCartney’s post-Beatles band, and titled “On Songs of Wings,” but something, somewhere, went horribly wrong.
July 6th, 2013 at 4:07 am
That link isn’t the one I would have used. This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Wings_of_Song is the original. The book is at least as good as Harold Bloom says, but the relevance of the Al Jolson picture is for you to fathom out when you’ve read it.
And Rags…really you should give it a shot. In a discreet brown paper cover.
July 6th, 2013 at 4:15 am
Oh, and thanks for not putting this up yesterday… it would have been a bit near the bone.
July 7th, 2013 at 1:50 pm
I thought this fellow was familiar.
July 8th, 2013 at 10:24 am
Daddy GaGa, I presume.
January 4th, 2016 at 2:50 pm
“Now be frank… is this outfit too much?”
August 29th, 2022 at 12:47 pm
His song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_G_qJGruqQ
August 29th, 2022 at 10:36 pm
@fred: Judging by the outfit, I’d have guessed this was his song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4fY4AqF_QU
June 15th, 2023 at 10:51 am
Miami Vice meets Stargate
June 15th, 2023 at 10:56 pm
@JJYoyo: NGL, I’d watch one episode of that.
But I’m still getting Drag Race vibes from this cover. Werk!
Still beats the first American cover, which prominently features blackface.
June 16th, 2023 at 3:09 am
@GSSxN: I got the same vibes, just didn’t wanna go there.
That first US cover is awful. Not sure I would call it blackface or just ineptitude … but if that charge keeps it out of my field of vision forever, I’ll go with it.
June 16th, 2023 at 7:08 pm
@JJYoyo: Apparently this book never got a good cover. It might have been great, for all I know, but all the covers seem to have kept me from reading it over the decades. And I was buying a LOT of SF in the 80s.
The F&SF cover for the first part of the serialized version is tolerable because Emsh. But that first US edition is for damn sure blackface; just look at that tiny Al Jolson at the bottom.
June 16th, 2023 at 7:50 pm
@GSSxN: went back to the first US cover and, oh my sweet jehovah you are right. Yikes.
June 17th, 2023 at 7:36 pm
As I read someone twitting the other day, “JESUS LUPITA NYONG’O CHRIST”.
I mean, I remember 1979 pretty well, and blackface was already non trop then in the mass consumer market.
So I don’t care if it was in the book as @Tat said; it’s still a terrible choice for the cover. This and the other ones are bad, but at least they weren’t insulting to an entire racial group with hundreds of years of trauma and embarrassing to others.