Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Cover Story

In my hostile takeover of the children's room, I started a massive fiction section overhaul. With the help of a shelflist (and mostly due to one of the pages) we are marking missing books and pulling titles that aren't circulating. I'm going through the titles that haven't circulated much in the last four years, and discarding a good bit. In my discard travels, I've come across a number of phenomenal books & covers. Disclaimer: my excitement about these books has almost nothing to do with the content, and nearly everything to do with the title and/or cover art.


The book that started it all. Hey There, Owlface is possibly made more hilarious by my library school buddy's deep-seeded fear of owls. But who can deny the ridiculousness of that title?

A gem pulled out of the stack by Kristi(e), my blog-dealer/coworker. This begs important questions such as why are they giving babies away? And why is this child holding a large toddler? Also, please note the difficult to read gold text at the top "The classic Christmas story". What? I know Christmas involves a baby and presents, but I never realized it was about giving away babies. I think I've been celebrating this one all wrong.
I have no idea what this book is about. But please note everything about this cat. Including that one eye features a slightly less frightening cat and a child. I think this is supposed to be a horror book, but I wouldn't even need to read this book to be horrified. Imagine meeting this cat in a dark house, the faces of the cat and baby reflecting at you in the dark. No thank you, creepy cat. Why would you ever create this cover art?



Super fun bonus offensive book!!
I discovered this in the super out of date "Disney" section of the picture book collection.
I have personally never seen "Song of the South", but I looked into it's existence back in my lifetime as a college English major. Suffice to say i was pretty amazed to find this as part of my picture book collection, and even more amazed to note it was added as a gift in 2004. Collection development note: you do not have to add every donation to your collection. I encourage you to do this with great discretion. Or at least glance at the donations before adding them.


Well, I hope this foray into weird old books has been entertaining and informative. Remember kids, take pictures of weird things, and always judge a book by it's cover. It may serve you well.


3 comments:

Alicia said...

I don't know whether it's more awesome that these books exist in the first place, or that you still have them all in your collection. Please post additional oddities as you come across them.

Anonymous said...

OH. MY. GOD!!!! Sara, seriously, Hey There Owlface is like the greatest sentence I've ever heard uttered, forget about the most magnificent title. I don't even care that it's about owls. It is more about being the truest of all beauties!

Seriously, I saved a picture of it, and will die if it is not the subject of one of our e-mail threads before the week is out.

Kristi(e) said...

Pure genius. Remember that time that I didn't even see "tar baby" and thought the book looked cute? What would I do without you...

I like how I'm your blog's dealer. It's hot. Danielle is mine.