Covers
October 30, 2015 1:27 AM   Subscribe

 
Gorgeous and hypnotic.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:49 AM on October 30, 2015


Now I want to read all the books.

This really hit me between the eyes. It's a lovely conceit, very nicely done, and I love the music, but I was even more taken by the cavalcade of titles. It took me right back to the time in the early/mid 70s when I had polished off the children's section of the local library (I could draw you a diagram even now, down to where on the shelves the SF section was, and where the stash of Gollancz yellow jackets lived) and after the librarians had consulted with my parents, I was Allowed Into The Adult Section.

After the disconcerting discovery that Roald Dahl had written books with names like Switch Bitch, I found shelves of books like those in this video. I knew about science - of course! - which was physics and chemistry and geology and fossils and biology and stars - but here was a whole new world of knowledge, which seemed to be related to the stuff they talked about on the news and in the documentaries presented by men with wide ties that I'd ignored, and it was neatly categorised and properly understood and wore the same clothes as quite a lot of the science fiction I'd inhaled. I had always seen SF and science as being much the same thing along a timeline where I was roughly in the middle, and now it expanded out to include all the stuff in the world I had been ignoring because it wasn't physics and dinosaurs and galaxies.

And now the cover art is nostalgia and the contents are irrelevant (and wrong) and what is this confection of knowledge we make for ourselves anyway?

So thanks for the existential angst and horrifying nostalgia, leibniz. Thanks for opening up the abyss of mortality and the feeling of being a dying fly caught in the cobweb of the limits of awareness on a Friday morning.

Here comes the empty spider of the void.

Here it comes.

Thanks a BUNCH.
posted by Devonian at 4:23 AM on October 30, 2015 [4 favorites]


Most excellent - thanks.
posted by jammy at 5:55 AM on October 30, 2015


And now you all understand that those cover artists were on LSD and not lazily putting up a few geometric shapes.
posted by Nanukthedog at 6:55 AM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


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