Gluing Book Jackets to Book Covers

I’m getting ready this morning to glue book jackets to book covers. Most of these are 1980’s science fiction book club books. Many of them are classic titles that are well regarded.

At the time of this writing the covid-19 crises has been around for about 4 months. At the same time there is a quite a bit of protesting and calls to action for Black Lives Matter. Seattle’s Capital Hill neighborhood is now called the CHOP and has declared it’s independence. There is also some evidence that wearing a mask is an appropriate way to reduce risk for yourself and others. It’s debatable whether or not people will actually comply with the requirements. Basically, my 2020 calendar has a lot of stuff cancelled and giant blank spots for the rest of the year.

So what does one have to do with the other? This pile of books is from a small family owned gift shop that is closing. When I went to pick up the books (they had sold my journals there) there was a crowd there in the shopping area. In some of these classic books they discuss the apocalypse and how people behave. Would people go shopping during a pandemic without masks? I had never thought about it. But some of these classic science fiction writers had thought about it and wrote these books.

These are not perfect books, of course. A fair number of these classic science fiction books were not written with today’s standards; either for lack of information dumps or inclusivity. So do I feel bad about tearing down these classic books and reducing the pages to what is currently not problematic? Nope. There were plenty of book club editions printed, people will like the iconic covers, and you can write or draw your own story in the classic science fiction novel.

It’s a couple days later and here are some of the book covers that have the book jacket pasted on them. I still need to transform them into journals.