I’m not a member of The cult of Kerouac but I choose him for this blog post because he’s an example of an author whose books people like to own… not just for literary reasons but as aesthetic objects. If you know what I mean.
The decision to put abstract artist Franz Kline on this cover of On the Road is interesting. Kline’s life gives the choice a darker edge. He drank heavily, worked obsessively, and reached real recognition only in his forties, by which time his health was already failing. He died in 1962 at just 51, from heart failure after years of physical strain and alcoholism. In retrospect, the cover feels less like an illustration and more like an x-ray: a record of force without rest. The work survived; the body didn’t. That tension between velocity and collapse turns out to be far closer to On the Road than any open highway ever could be.
Now personally, I can’t stand abstract art but I’m very interested in book covers and I love the aesthetics of the paperback. That’s why I only buy second hand books because just the shininess of the newness of a paperback is not as aesthetically pleasing. When you have an old book not only does it have elements of cultural history simply in the choice of the cover itself, but it has a story. Somebody owned it, or your uncle owned it or you stole it from school or whatever.
This blog post is basically a very long way of saying in reply to a visitor’s question about where I buy my books... I buy them all from…
https://www.awesomebooks.com/
Obviously you have to buy a little bit in bulk because you can’t start spending postage from the UK to other countries for individual books, but they are incredibly cheap cheap and they’re catalog is multiple warehouses full of books.
