SENSATIONAL COVERS NO GUIDE TO LITERATURE.

Shannon News, 3 December 1929, Page 2

SENSATIONAL COVERS NO GUIDE TO LITERATURE.

REVOLVER DRAW. Once upon a time books eame to the bookseller from, the publisher ‘ thirteens as twelves/ onc-and-ninepence for a half-crown seller, naked and unashamed without an overcoat on, says M.A.T. in the Auckland Star. In those days there was universally solemn binding without loose pict.orial effect in a jacket, and the sinner was merely guided in his selection of a novel by the yellow back. If the back was yellow the contents, were supposed to be a fair corker. Yet some of the most devastatingly moral , books ever penned by respectable spinsters have had yellow .backs. Nowadays no book can be sold without an overcoat and no doubt that groat public which highbrow affects to despise* is frequently guided by the picture on thp loose wrapper. -But a wrappered book in a reader’s hand is a handicap. The wrapper slides and slips all over the place just when one is delighting in a beautiful murder or arrives at the point whe.re the dofeetivo nails his man. Guided by a wrapper expressing in bold artistic terms the heroine who appears to be the most- rapid of hussies, the read of rushes into a shop and procures it. Sedulously searching the book for the naughtiness the picture suggests, one finds to his unutterable boredom the book to be speechlessly respectable Naughty picture wrappers sell many books so blameless as to be almost a scandal. One imagines the author of a new book giving instructions to tinartist: “Pick out the main chief sensation and draw that/’ says the author. The artist, therefore, first draws a revolver (with a pencil, one means) and piles the incident round it. Many a million readers have been deceived, into buying a book by a revolver on the wrapper. Of sixteen books in a nca\ series of old books, twelve had suddendeath wrappers (mostly the revolver death, of course), but including a couple of stabs, a bludgeoning and a poison affair.