Inside Jacket

I would like to show you this crazy cover from 1953. Mutant by Lewis Padgett aka Henry Kuttner. Gnome Press was the publisher. What can I say? They certainly don’t make book covers like this one anymore. Those floating heads really make me think of Star Trek for some reason.

Compare the floating heads version to the Weidenfeld & Nicolson British edition from 1954, featuring a green humanoid, that actually is a little more threatening. What a difference one year and several thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean can make. Apparently, the designer in London was Charles King.

Kuttner (1915-1958) was an American author of science fiction, fantasy and horror. His science fiction writing is considered to be pioneering and influenced many writers across many genres.

Aside from Padgett, he also wrote as Lawrence O’Donnell. Mutant is an example of a ‘fix-up’ when a collection of related stories are melded together to make it appear to be a novel.

He would have been 86 tomorrow, it says right here on his birth certificate.

Truman Capote’s Birth Certificate

Let’s all do the Page 99 Test – coined by Ford Madox Ford – to see if a book is worth reading. Just open to page 99, have a gander and if it sounds interesting head to the beginning. If it sounds not so good, then…..

I’ve just opened The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews, which is supposed to be pretty good, and scanned page 99. There appears to be two people talking about yoga, which is an instant turn-off for me. One paragraph gives me hope – someone called Logan explains his hero is a person who cut off their own arm with a penknife after being pinned under a huge rock.

I missed this story about author Nick Hornby working with musician Ben Folds to produce an album called Lonely Avenue until hearing about it on NPR this morning. I imagine lyric writing came pretty easy to Hornby who, of course, adores music and blends it into much of his writing.

Operation Dark Heart by Anthony Schaffer is by far the most searched for book on AbeBooks.com at the moment after a flurry of newspaper articles revealed how the Pentagon is pulping 10,000 copies of this book.

Government officials are apparently attempting to protect military secrets about operations in Afghanistan that are contained in the book.

This story has been bubbling along for several weeks now but has suddenly exploded after some mainstream media finally latched onto the significance of these events. First editions of Operation Dark Heart will become a nice little collector’s item once all this fuss dies down.