Signet Classics Covers From The 1960's

I've harshly criticized nostalgia in this blog, but naturally, I myself am not completely immune to it. To my emotions, certain novels are no longer printed in the correct way because they're not made with the covers they had in the Signet Classics series in the 1960's. For example, Moby Dick:

Naturally, since the Signet Classics paperbacks were so popular back then, I'm not the only one who has these sorts of feelings. For example, consider this tribute posted on Goodreads, and I quote:

"Aren't those covers awesome? And doesn't the paper hold up well, after all these decades, especially in the earlier copies? Aren't some of those afterwards interesting?"

Yes, yes and yes!

Many readers of Signet Classics of that era may recall what a terrible translator of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky Constance Garnett was -- really, really awful -- you don't have to understand a single word of Russian to know how badly she translated it -- and yet know exactly what I mean when I say that I mourn the Signet Classics covers which passed away as better translators took over, and that no other edition of The Brothers Karamazov looks like the real one except this:

I was into the Signet Classics well before I was full grown. I moved from the children's section of our excellent small-town library and into the stacks with the books for adults just as soon as I realized that there was no rule against it -- I'm terrible with dates, but this was probably around 1971, when I turned 10. The head librarian was wonderful. She took note of my grown-up tastes in reading material with definite approval.

The people who made the picture for the covers of the Signet Classics in the 1960's were several, and unfortunately they are not named anywhere in the volumes themselves, at least not in the ones I've inspected. I'm not sure, but I think that whoever made the title illustration for that edition of Moby Dick also made this picture:

And this one, too, my very favorite book-cover illustration:

Why my favorite book-cover ever? Probably just because it was my favorite when I was a child, and nostalgia has kept those childish sensations alive in me.

Not that I'm actually a great fan of James Fenimore Cooper. As far as historical accuracy goes: The Mohicans, or Mahicans, didn't die out centuries ago, as Cooper would have you believe. They are still among us today. Cooper didn't write well. There was not a witty bone in his body nor a supple phrase in his soul.

I am a very great fan of Melville, though. I have a copy of Moby Dick which looks like the one pictured above. It was printed in 1962, acquired by me in the 1980's, I think, and the paper, just as the person quoted above from Goodreads says, is very nice indeed, very high-quality, and much sturdier than the binding. Repeatedly, avidly read, certain pages pored over with especially great attention, the volume is coming more and more to resemble a collection of loose leaves in a folder rather than an actual bound book. Likewise, the paper in my Signet Classics copy of Tom Jones, printed in 1964, is very good paper, might as well be new rather than 51 years old, although the book's front cover is gone, worn off many years ago.

It wasn't much of a cover to me. No offense to anyone who treasures it.

The Religious Situation

Back in the 20th century there was a particularly silly conversation going on among some literary critics and associated buffoons, asking when and if anyone was ever going to write The Great American Novel. Philip Roth made appropriate fun of this pretentious silliness by calling the novel he published in 1973 The Great American Novel.

One of the reasons it was silly was because many great American novels had already been written. But if you insisted on calling one of them THE Great American Novel, well that was also no problem: Herman Melville published it in 1851, and America's literary critics, those monumental wastes, trashed it. It's called Moby Dick. It stands comparison with War and Peace and Don Quixote and Tom Jones and Ulysses and any other Greatest Novel Of All Time you got. Moby Dick is the stuff.

It begins with a page concerning the word "whale" in English and the words for whales in several other languages; then a dozen pages of quotes concerning whales taken from the a variety of sources arranged chronologically from Genesis up to Melville's time; then comes Chapter 1, whose first paragraph contains these three sentences:

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."

When I first read Moby Dick I had already been very pleasantly surprised by the literary whaling voyage undertaken before Chapter 1, but when I read the above passage, Melville had me. I knew that he was one of my guys and that I was one of his. It came as no surprise to me when, some time after my first reading of Moby Dick, and then of his novel The Confidence Man and his story "Bartleby the Scrivener," I learned that Melville had been an atheist. Of course he had. The thing about needing the strong moral principle in order not to spectacularly lose his composure and manners had already told me that he was like me.

I came here today to talk to you about the people who make you want to step into the street and lose all control of the angry part of yourself: Christian theologians. I got a book today: The Religious Situation by Paul Tillich, translated from Die religioese Lage der Gegenwart by H Richard Niebuhr.

I have this book because I am weak, in insufficient control of my bookworm tendencies, and because it was free, one of the books being given away at the local library. I knew better than to even pick up a book by Paul Tillich. And when I read on the back cover of this Living Age Books edition, Published by Meridian Books, Fifth printing July 1960, that Nietzsche was one of the book's subjects, I knew even better.

But I'm weak. And so, on the first page of Niebuhr's introduction to his translation of Tillich's book, I read this:

"It is not a book about the religion of the churches but an effort to interpret the whole contemporary situation from the point of view of one who constantly inquires what fundamental faith is expressed in the forms which civilization takes. Tillich is more interested in the religious values of secularism, of modern movements in art, science, education, and politics than in tracing tendencies within the churches or even in theology."

"The religious values of secularism." Cato the Younger falls on his sword, Ishmael (the narrator of Moby Dick) gets on a ship, some poor guy who doesn't know what to do walks out onto a crowded Manhattan street and actually does start knocking people's hats from their heads, or something even less socially acceptable, because he simply can't take it any more, until they drag him screaming to Bellevue -- Melville and I write about it. Maybe I'll take a hint from Roth and write a book and call it The Religious Situation. Or The Moral Landscape.