March 24, 2021

Something Good #11: No Jackets Required

What you’re about to read may shock you.

I don’t know how many books I have. Certainly in the hundreds. I like owning books! I always have more than I can reasonably fit on my shelves, but I’m reluctant to let any of them go. They’re just nice to have around, and in terms of decor, what’s nicer than a wall of bookshelves?

I especially like hardcovers. Having grown up reading cheap paperbacks, hardcovers feel like an particularly adult indulgence. There’s a tactile pleasure to holding a cloth-bound book in my lap, to knowing it won’t fall apart like some cheap glued-together Penguin edition.

Buying a hardcover of a new release I’ve been looking forward to… ahh, that’s the good stuff.

But. What I really do not like are dust jackets. I’ve been annoyed with them for years. They puff out; the book slides around in your hands. Using them as bookmarks is just terrible, especially when you’re reading something thick. They sure don’t stop any dust from collecting.

Dust jackets are the book equivalent of plastic sofa covers. A lifetime of ugliness in exchange for minimal protection from the elements.1 There must be a reason libraries ditch them, right?

So, a couple of months ago, in a fit of cabin-fever-induced-mania, I went through my entire book collection and removed the dust jacket of every single one. (They all went into a box in my basement, in case I “needed them later.”)

I know that seems crazy. But I immediately realized I had made a wonderful decision. And I hope you’re willing to try it too.

What I hadn’t realized was that beneath these useless jackets, some worn, some tattered, many unpleasantly plastic-y, was a treasure trove of beautiful embossed typography and illustrations that had sat undiscovered and unappreciated, many for decades.

Each unfurled jacket was a wonderful discovery.

Some revealed intricate, and until now, entirely hidden illustrations.

Others featured bold colours I never would have guessed were there.

Some simply presented handsomely-embossed spine text, which caught the light beautifully.

And others showed off striking artistic choices that had been seemingly watered down for the outer cover design.

It was a genuine treat to peel them off one by one and find the treasures inside. There wasn’t a single case in which I felt the jacketed book looked better than its former, shrouded self.

My bookshelves gleam now. I am happier. And I encourage you, reader, to join the #nojacketsrequired movement!

Here’s my challenge to you: remove a couple of dust jackets from your library and send in your best discovery (you can just reply to this email). I’ll post the most beautiful one(s).

Won’t you join me?

PS: As the above images show, taking pictures of books, especially book spines, is… not easy, so don’t worry about making the shot look nice.

“One of the biggest mysteries of the year 2020 was an unknown Italo Disco or Euro Disco track playing on a video tape recording of a party in Goa back in 1989. After thousands of hours of collective searching, the missing track was finally found. This is the story of The Search.”

Ummmm—yes, this very much plays to my interests. A bunch of anonymous Discogs (a vinyl obsessive website) put their heads together to hunt down an obscure ‘80s party track and actually succeeded, although it wasn’t easy.

Between the title of the song (“Geronimo”) and the partying hippies losing their mind on a beach in India, the whole thing is somewhat of a clusterfuck of cultural appropriation, but it’s a great archeological deep dive. I love this story because I’m fascinated by the idea of using scraps of evidence to unearth an otherwise mundane, totally forgotten moment from the past. That sort of investigation was what I loved the most about doing Sad YouTube.

(The song isn’t that great, though, and I love Italo-Disco, for whatever that’s worth.)

I also loved Hanif Abdurraqib’s New York Times Magazine article, “A World of Black Intimacy at the Card Table,” a meditation on the meaning of games, friendship and the shifting cultural meanings behind house rules.

There is no real consistency to house rules other than the fact that you don’t question someone else’s house rules. It feels, in effect, like questioning an ancestor or elder. Someone who most likely is not there in earthly form but who taught the game in a very particular way and demanded that it be played that way. The spades player must be versatile and willing to go with any rules laid down, even if they seem absurd or unfair or entirely whimsical. If the game is being played in mixed company in some neutral location like a hotel room or a basement bar, the house rules defer to whoever is from the place where the game is being played, or whoever has some kin from somewhere closest to wherever the game is being played. There is no governing body that makes it like this, only a code of honor among the people playing. Once, in Virginia, someone I was playing with tried to trace family roots to Charlottesville just to place deuces high when no one else wanted to.

Also in the New York Times this week is this melancholy article about the decline of bookshops and cinemas in Paris’s Latin Quarter. That neighbourhood hasn’t been the hotbed of intellectual and cultural activity it once was for decades—it’s long been gentrified—but the closing of these institutions is still sad. I once spent many evenings in the area’s tiny, shabby Action art house cinemas, watching films from Hollywood’s golden age, which still attracted big crowds.

Closer to home, beloved local bookseller S.W. Welch was recently threatened by a rent hike that would have closed it, but a swift, outraged local reaction managed to save it for the time being. But the property speculation and empty storefronts causing this cultural and economic malaise don’t seem to be going away.

Bonus track:

Thanks to everyone who chimed in on last week’s potato chips issue. There was a great Metafilter thread about it, which—as a nerd of a certain vintage—pleased me to no end.

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