A Brief Complaint, Only Tangentially Related to My Last

I have yet another complaint for which I expect no remedy.  In the first place, I don't know quite what it is of which I mean to complain.  Put it another way, I don't have the vocabulary to accurately describe the problem, though I may say I am not the only one to complain of it.  Customers and booksellers at the bookstore where I work and elsewhere have commented on this, but none of us seems to be able to communicate our dissatisfaction to anyone in a position to do anything much about it.

Sticky covers.  There.  That's about as close as I've been able to get to a description.  The new series, Drop Caps from Penguin Classics of which I so recently wrote is a perfect example.  Here are these handsomely designed new editions of classic books -- as well as some I would simply call popular -- published in stoutly bound and brightly colored hardcovers at a reasonable price.  Each copy comes without a dust-jacket, but shrink-wrapped from the publisher. ( For any that might not know, shrink-wrap is basically a thin plastic bag in which merchandise, in this case new books, are sealed to keep each copy pristine.  The plastic is shrunk by means of applied heat to conform to the shape of the thing inside, thus, shrink-wrap.)  Most attractive, these new uncovered books, at least until actually handled, however briefly by human hands.  The problem is in the treatment used in covering the cardboard covers, not in the plastic packaging.  The surface of these new books is not the more traditional colored or painted cardboard and cloth.  Instead, there is this... stuff, and while this... stuff, as I say, looks great, it isn't as smooth as the usual covers; it seems to be just porous enough to register dirt, oil, fingerprints, everything with which the book may happen to come in contact and this almost immediately once the books have been taken out of the shrink-wrap.  This same substance, or something like or at least equally disagreeable, is now used regularly on the more traditional dust-jackets that come wrapped around most hardcover books.  Whatever this paint or process is, it is new enough that I only noticed it on new books just a few years ago.  Since the first one I handled seemed at the time to be an isolated experiment, perhaps by one publisher, it seemed to be just some passing fancy of some designer somewhere.  In the past two or three years though, this... stuff, whatever it is has been adopted by more and more publishers in one form or another.  I can only guess at the reason why, as no one I know in publishing seems still to have the faintest idea what I'm talking about when I've asked.

My theory is that there must have been someone, probably a designer, who liked the look of this matte finish that still showed color as well or better than the traditional photographic technique (?) used when printing pictorial dust-jackets.  Maybe this stuff was less expensive as well.  I wouldn't know.  It has the feel, and here I do mean the actual feel of an aesthetic choice made in some airy isolation wherein no practical voice was ever raised to point out that books are meant to be read and that to read a book it must be handled, carried about from place to place, most likely, picked up and put down on surfaces of various composition and cleanliness, in other words, used.  Books are meant to be used.  That seems so obvious a fact as to be embarrassing to mention, until one considers for instance all the impractical, not to say impossible shapes, sizes, prints, fonts and related nonsense into which the merry art school types have been making books ridiculous now and then for years and years.  Novelty art books like Madonna's Sex, years back come immediately to mind.  Remember that one?  It had metal covers on a spiral binding, metal covers that fell off, usually after one look.  It was really cool, so long as one never opened it.  Or the coffee-table-book memorializing the great electric guitars which was an oversized book shaped like an electric guitar.  That one fit on no bookshelf or display table anywhere ever.  Didn't last out a Christmas season, as I remember.  Skyscraper books shaped like skyscrapers, dye-cuts that invariably had tiny bits that broke on every other copy of the book coming out of the carton, buff paper covers as pure and white as salted slush just from being shipped in a truck from the printers; the list of impractical beauties is long and checkered.

And now, there's this... stuff.   It not only doesn't hold up to use, it actually feels kinda creepy just holding it; less plush than tacky, as if the inks had never quite set.

As I said at the beginning of this, I can't pretend to know what I'm talking about here.  Don't take my word for this.  Unwrap a copy of Ellery Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery and just run your thumb across the covers.  See if it doesn't feel wrong.  See if it doesn't leave a smudge, even if your hands are clean as a choirboy's.  It's just not nice.  Whatever this... stuff is, I say again, it is not pleasant.  It was a bad idea.  I wish it would stop.  Stop.  Just quit it, publishers, Penguin Classics, please?

(I don't mean to pile on the good people at Random Penguin and Penguin Classics.  Gods bless them and all who sail under their flag.  They do good work!  But it is worth mentioning that the last time Penguin hired some other very talented new designers to produce that other hardcover series of reissued classics, the ones with nice cloth covers, they managed to fuck that up a little bit too.  The designs are lovely, and the books well made.  I bought myself a nice hardcover copy of Wilkie Collins' Woman in White from that bunch.  Lovely thing it was, with birds all over it.  The idea seems to have been to reproduce in an a relatively inexpensive and more modern design, something of the richness of earlier cloth covers that were often elaborately embossed.  With these new designs though, the birds were just inked onto the cloth, not impressed in any way and so by the time my lovely new book had taken one or two bus commutes, the birds were already fading no matter how carefully, even lovingly I handled that book.  Now maybe, just maybe this effect was somehow anticipated by the designer and this wear was seen as reproducing in quick-time some of the more weathered charms of older books, but that is probably just me bullshitting on behalf of artists I don't know.  Honestly, I think nobody could be much bothered to rub two copies together and notice the effect before the damned things shipped out to the warehouse and the retailers.  The result again was something that was lovely, until it was used, because, you know... books.)

Case of the Curious Q

So, here's what I'm reading, an unexpected reissue of The Greek Coffin Mystery, by Ellery Queen.  This is the 17th number in the new series, Penguin Drop Caps, handsome little hardcovers all, with designs by "typography wunderkind," Jessica Hische.

I must just say, I'm enjoying this, the novel, I mean.

First then, a bit about the book.  I don't know that I'd ever read an Ellery Queen novel before. Short stories I've certainly read: in the old Ellery Queen Magazine, and in many an anthology, including two they did for the Modern Library, 101 Years' Entertainment: The Great Detective Stories, 1841 - 1941, and The Female of the Species: Great Women Detectives and Criminals, from 1943, both of which I own and treasure for those restless evenings between books.  Almost entirely reliable -- though I do remember and exceptionally thin Christie met with in one or the other.  I am old enough of course to remember the Jim Hutton television series (1975-1976), but not so old as to really remember the various other film adaptations, radio serials and the like.  Still, the "brand" as it were, is familiar. 

"Ellery Queen" was in fact two cousins, Daniel Nathan, alias Frederic Dannay (1905 – 1982) and Manford (Emanuel) Lepofsky, alias Manfred Bennington Lee (1905 – 1971.)  Together they not only created the eponymous detective and put him into more than 30 books, but also edited the magazine and a variety of other titles, including the classic anthologies already mentioned.  They wrote and produced for the radio and early television (an interesting bit of trivia, my beloved Helene Hanff paid for her dental work by scripting The Adventures of Ellery Queen, 1950 - 1952.)  For a good long while there, Ellery Queen was the most popular fictional American detective and nearly as familiar to the domestic reader as Sherlock Holmes.  Not so much, now.  (Worth noting, as we come closer to the question to be raised here, that I can not find a single, current reference to the authors online or in print that does not mention the cousins' given names as well as their nom de plume and the fact that they were from Brooklyn.  While nowhere made more explicit that I could find, and in case you missed it, the reader is presumably meant to deduce that the writers were Jewish, whereas their detective was distinctly not.  On the one hand this reinforces the admirable trajectory of an American success story, I suppose, -- Brooklyn boys made good -- but it may also be meant by today's Ellery Queen apologists to excuse some of the more unhappy passages in the genre writing of the day, The Greek Coffin Mystery not excepted.  Read on.)

While there is still a devoted fan-base, and, as I'm learning, good fun still to be had from Ellery Q., like many a whodunit of the Golden Age, there is more than a whiff of the musty slang and creaky cliches of the pulps about them.  Only 50 pages into my first and I've already encountered cops thick as walls, a comic Dutchman, etc. More unfortunately still, and typical of the time, a leggy young secretary when questioned giggles and complains of her "nerves," and a Greek interpreter is called "greasy" no less than three times on a single page!  Exactly the kind of sexual and ethnic shorthand that so distastefully dates many an antique mystery and which might, in part, explain something of their justifiably faded popularity.  (If any further proof was needed of the day of Ellery Queen having passed, at best into quaintness, I also learn to my surprise that our athletic young hero sports glinting pince-nez!  "'Shakes of Astarte!' murmured Ellery.")

I was then in a way made both curious and more than a little confused to find Ellery Queen selected to represent the letter "Q" in this latest series of hardcover classics from Penguin.  While I will be the first to admit that the pickings are slim when it comes to that least likely of English letters, the Drop Caps series had actually already disappointed a little, at least in the beginning of their run, by the most predictable and ubiquitous selection of authors and titles; "A" being not only Austen, but Pride and Prejudice, "B" being Bronte, Charlotte, but also the all but inevitable Jane Eyre, and so on.  Austen and Bronte I'll grant them, but why not Emma (my favorite) or Persuasion, which I am not alone in thinking the first lady's best?  Why not Vilette or Shirley for the latter lady?  Why always the most obvious or at least the most familiar title?  Why so seldom a genuine discovery or at least some variation?

But then, not all surprises are good.  It's a problem, that designation of "classic," particularly when limiting the reissue of great authors to a single, representative title.  Usually means just the one book, endlessly reissued.  Gets a bit boring, that.  Why not mix it up a little?  Why not indeed?  Again, be careful what you wish for, readers.  This time, not long after the letter "G", here represented a little more interestingly by William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the whole enterprise goes rather wildly off the rails.  "H" is for Hesse's Siddhartha, for which a good case may still be made, but then "I" is an early title from an author still very much alive and writing, namely Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, and while "J" is for Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, come to "K" and, well... we get Sue Monk Kidd and The Secret Life of Bees and any pretence to the claim of "classic" has clearly been abandoned altogether. 

Like what must by now be more than a million others, in book clubs and out, I read The Secret Life of Bees.  For me, it was just part of the job, which requires at least a passing familiarity with what's on the bestseller lists and buzzing around the suburban reading circles.  As popular fiction goes, there was, as I remember it, much to recommend Kidd's book as a socially responsible and entertaining late example of the Magical American Negro novel in which spiritually superior and earnestly earthy African Americans teach a little white girl to love life and so on, and on.  As will be obvious by now, not a favorite of mine.  I don't think anything that might best be summarized as largely inoffensive prose in service of a heartwarming racial cliche rises to the level of a classic novel.  I don't think, with very few exceptions (Catch 22 comes first to mind, or more relevantly here, To Kill a Mockingbird,) that such a thing is possible for a contemporary novel within the lifetime of the author, and the possibility in this case seems particularly remote.  One has only to review the mid-century selections of the Modern Library to see title after title subsequently consigned to forgetfulness for proof of the wobbly power of prediction, to say nothing here of the lasting power of a Pulitzer Prize, say, or even a Nobel.

So even if one were willing concede Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club for "T" without mentioning Thackeray, Trollope, or Twain, how then Kidd for "K" in preference to Kafka, Kipling, Kerouac, Kingsley, Kosinski, Kawabata or Knowles, or come to that, Kristof, Kundera or Kureishi?!

Which brings me back to the case of the curious "Q".  The possibilities are nearly as thin as "X", which at least presents some old style translations of Chinese names.  While I was personally tickled to find Ellery Queen and bought my first retail copy of the series as a result, this title and the whole enterprise of the Drop Caps have all too clearly illustrated the general debasement of that word "classic," -- a problem to which I regularly and unthinkingly have contributed in my own small way, even here.  What then is a "classic"?

I haven't an answer to offer in any way other than the negative, obviously, by saying what I think it ain't, but that is less than adequate to even my case.  So, there we are.

Personally, I blush a bit to be seen with even Ellery Queen masquerading as same, but I absolutely draw the line at least at the empty calories of s'mores like The Secret Life of Bees.  Jeez Louise, Penguin.