Olive Editions: For Those Who Miss Those Edward Gorey Anchor Covers, Maybe

Miss Edith admits to being just pretentious enough that she has hoarded, over the years, a certain number of those paperbacks that Anchor did, aeons ago, with cover art by a relatively young Edward Gorey.
Not only have I hoarded them, but I actually have four of these covers inexpensively framed and they are hanging in a room where they are, take my word for it, rather inappropriate.

While many publishers since then have developed paperback lines that appealed to me because of their design -- those 80s chic Vintage Contemporaries spring to mind (you remember them: think of your ancient copies of "Bright Lights, Big City" or "Bad Behavior" or "I Look Divine"), as well as those way cool Black Lizard paperbacks (reprints of classic mystery/thriller crap from Jim Thompson and David Goodis and that crowd) -- it's been quite some time since I could think of a publisher that had come up with a paperback format that really struck me as being something special. The most recent ones I can think of are those Penguin paperbacks with the letterpress-feeling covers -- the Great Ideas series. I sold a zillion of them when I worked at Atticus two years ago; they had a nice edition of "Why I Write" by George Orwell which was very popular, but my own personal favorite, which I never read but adored for the title, was Hazlitt's "On the Pleasures of Hating." Maybe I oughta read that someday. Penguin also did this concept again with little travel-oriented writings, but since I don't care so much for that genre I pretty much ignored it; plus, by the time they released them, I'd stopped being a bookseller. But the Great Ideas series, man, that was marketing genius.

Another snazzy line is those paperbacks of lost classics that get reprinted by the New York Review of Books. Now, they've got a very handsome line of paperbacks, which I admire in concept a lot more than in practice (the truth is, most of what they reprint, I don't give a fig about, though I have bought a handful of titles over the years). Perhaps almost more important is the series of reprints they've done of children's classics, which includes the Jenny the Cat books (way important, people).

So, let's sum this up: within the last ten years, say, there've been two lines of paperbacks where the design of the objects struck me as being important enough to make me pay attention to the books themselves. Now, let's add to that the Harper Perennial enterprise of Fall 2008, the Olive Editions.

The Olive Editions really do remind me, immediately, of those Edward Gorey Anchor paperbacks. (To be fair, many of the Anchor books had designs and typography by folks other than Gorey -- good people, too; it's just that I'm partial to the Gorey.) The typeface on the covers is just similar enough. And there's something about the size of the books: they're a mite larger than a mass market paperback and not nearly as bulky as a trade paperback -- so you really could wedge one of these into your coat pocket, say, the way I wedged my Anchor edition of "What Maisie Knew" into the front pocket of my leather jacket as I was heading out to a Ramones show one night many years ago. (That's a true story, by the way.) These are friendly-looking books. Not trashy. Friendly. Appealing. The kind of books, like the New York Review Classics series, that makes you want to see a zillion of them all lined up on your shelves, maybe organized by color or something.

I'm aware of three books published in these editions so far. One of them, by Jonathan Safran Foer, is a title that I pledged years ago I would never read, so I won't be acquiring that. Another of them is Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I admired sort of when I was about eighteen but wouldn't dream of re-reading now (I'm too busy re-reading books about materialistic New Yorkers, but thanks anyway). Still: it would be right and just, I think, for today's eighteen year olds of a certain stripe to pick up the Olive Edition of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and give it a roll; it's worth it for the bits about how you can have sex with anyone, but sleeping with someone is another matter entirely.

And then the last book I know of in the series is The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, the first novel by Michael Chabon.

This book knocked my socks off when I read it -- again, when I was eighteen, when it was first published. I remember working in a bookstore and forcing it into people hands, saying, "This is the best thing since "Catcher in the Rye."" I know everyone worships Chabon now, what with Kavalier and Clay (which bored me so much I never finished it) and all that, and I know I ought to be a little more respectful. But basically, when it comes to Chabon, all I care about is that first novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and then Wonder Boys, which came out a few years later, and which I think is just remarkable (movie, too).

So look, people. These Olive Editions maybe be badly bound, I don't know. But they're really handsome, in a cute way; and they've got quality text printed on them thar pages; and for God's sake, they're cheap! Ten bucks! So humor Miss Edith, please: if you've never read it before, or if you read it a long time ago but have lost your browning old trade paperback, please buy The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and go get yourself a cappucino and just... revel in the moment.


Thanks, Harper Perennial. What will the new editions of Laurie Colwin look like?