A few posts back, Scott Bryan Wilson rhapsodized about some great mass market paperbacks in his personal collection that had been unlikely to get the mass market treatment. His photos didn’t get me thinking about unlikely titles on my own shelves; there aren’t any, really.  Forgive the overly sentimental post, but these paint a patchwork of my early experience with books. Besides, the old covers are outstanding and I took some (shaky) photos of some of the best.

My oldest books are of a past that I bought in high school when I was too young to have a past of my own, and before I realized that fiction was still living, and vibrant, and new. From the swaps at the library where I worked, from the garage where my parents stored their old books, and from the bags I brought home every summer from Printer’s Row tables and the Brandeis Used Book Fair, I gathered copies of 1960s and 1970s mass markets and cheap reprints with gorgeous, garish covers that seemed wildly slapdash and insanely improvised in comparison to the polished and slick books that publishers push out today. The pictured copy of Cat’s Cradle was not only my first Kurt Vonnegut book, but it’s the same copy my mother carried around in the early 70s. When it fell apart from heavy reading and your typical mass market adhesives, a kindly high school librarian–and a cousin to Ayn Rand!–taped it back together for me. When my copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X met the same end, I read the pages, shuffled and reshuffled, for a few more years before they scattered.

At 17, I don’t think I knew any working American authors outside of the Grishams and Kings and Koontzs I read–I did read them–and discarded while picking through the heaps. When my sister brought me Philip Roth, she brought me a lifeline. And when she gave me Bohumil Hrabal’s I Served the King of England, it must have been, along with Chinua Achebe and Albert Camus, some of the first international lit I had ever read.  When a smirking older friend gave me a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, I’ve no doubt that she saw me as Ignatius J. Reilly. The resemblance has only gotten more pronounced.

I can’t find my 1984 commemorative edition of 1984, but allow me to submit a Sgt. Pepper rendering of Andrew Jackson. In these pages, historian Robert V. Remini had the sense to quote James Parton, another Jackson biographer. Jackson was described as a “patriot and a traitor. He was the greatest of the generals and wholly ignorant of the art of war. He was the most candid of men and capable of the profoundest dissimulation. He was a democratic autocrat, an urbane savage, an atrocious saint.” Such immortal language, and in a very disposable book. How could I not hold onto it?