Paperback 280: The Female Man / Joanna Russ (Bantam Q8765)

Paperback 280: Bantam Q8765 (PBO, 1975)

Title: The Female Man
Author: Joanna Russ
Cover artist: uncredited

Yours for: $15


Best things about this cover:

• "See, you thought I was a woman, but under these boobs ... no, wait, under these boobs ..."
• You decide: crazy red hair that conveniently hides her (apparently faux) vagina? or monstrous red pubic hair that is attempting to eat her head?
• "Dad, this stripper is scaring me. Can we go home now?"

Best things about this back cover:

• "Reality Times 3" — sounds like a very bad educational / religious rap act.
• Passive voice cavalcade in that fourth sentence is setting my teeth on edge.
• Apparently a reference to Philip Wylie's "The Disappearance" meant something to someone at some point.

Page 123~

I want love. (she dropped her paper cup of lemonade and covered her face with her hands.)

Wow, they really screwed up her order.

~RP

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Paperback 28: Signet Y6638

Paperback 28: Signet Y6638 (1st Signet, 1975)

Title: The Big Gold Dream
Author: Chester Himes
Cover artist: Uncredited

Best things about this cover:

• Orange!
• "Starsky and Hutch"-era font - and fashion!
• Somebody needs to tell the white woman in the bra and panties that a back alley is no place to play leap frog.
  
• Chester Himes rules - despite being a mid-70s reprint, this book is reasonably valuable, both because Chester Himes is the most important black crime fiction writer of the 20th century (sorry, Walter Mosley) and because this particular incarnation of Himes' work is hard to come by.
• This cover is poorly designed - sometime starting in the late-60s, you begin to see these covers where a single realistic scene gives way to a composite montage, where lots of different pictures are crammed together into a kind of blob in the middle of the cover. Somebody's (bad) idea of artistic. Check out how this cover gets all abstract expressionist toward its edges - like it was finished by Rothko or Rauschenberg.
• Yet another floating head - this time, an oddly benevolent-looking, kerchiefed young lady is preparing to devour Harlem.

RP