Wednesday, July 7, 2010

It ill behooves the ordinary working writer to covet material goods. We have enough trouble buying food. Yet sometimes, dear reader, we do yearn for tangible treasures. (I have no idea why I'm speaking in the plural here. Perhaps I have been reading so much Michael Cox that my mind has been invaded by Queen Victoria, or perhaps onetime my pen names, Suzanne Scott and Suzanne Judson, have been called forth by the pulp-fiction theme of this post.) Today, we crave one or more of the brilliant faux-book-cover posters devised by the Heldfond Book Gallery. Each poster is designed like the cover of a pulp novel, though the theme of each, with deliberate irony, is the far less earthy world of rare books. Our personal favorite, glimpsed in its "sample" form at the left, is entitled BiblioBimbo and features a James Dean type leering at a suitably trashy babe under the tag line, "Every Bookseller In Town Had Been In Her Library"—proving, if it requires proof, that it is possible to make utterly innocent words sound completely filthy if you're clever enough. Anyway, kudos to Heldfond for celebrating both the pulp legacy and the rare book marketplace at once in such fine form, and for all of the beautiful rare books they more seriously purvey. (I crave the limited edition book of Henri Cartier-Bresson's illustrations of Rimbaud's Sonnet of the Vowels they offer, too, but the twenty-five-buck BiblioBimbo poster is precisely 72 times more affordable.)

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