After discussing The Stranger in class, I went to the library to do some "investigating" and I found it very interesting. It is the strange cover with the men in the striped hats and white faces. Only he binding of the book is glued to a green cover. So if you open the book, the first and last page of it is actually the original paper back cover. The book is obviously very old, so as suggested in class, I thought maybe it was a preservation technique so the binding of the book doesn't fall apart. However, I then noticed on the shelf above it, there was another Camus book, The Fall that was arguable in worse condition and it still had its original paper back cover. I checked it out and began reading it, which I will discuss further in a future blog post, but so far it is not like any other book I've read and I will explain later what is so unique and fascinating about it. The Fall is quite literally falling apart. The binding has been taped multiple times to try to preserve it, but it looks like it is beyond help at this point. One page isn't even attached to the binding, it kind of just fell out of the book. So now I think I have even more questions/ am confused because it doesn't seem like it has the hard cover for the purpose of protecting the book.
Another thing that I found cool its that even at first glance, it is glaringly obvious that these two copies of the books were the same edition/ publisher. They used the same font and white lettering for the titles and name of author. There is even the same hint of blue (In The Stranger, the words "a novel" is in blue and in The Fall there is a thin blue line separating the title from the author. The covers also are mainly black and white with only a hint of color. I wonder if all of the books published by "Vintage House" look the same, or if only their Camus books are. One more thing I would like to mention about these two books is the last page which gives a brief summary of Camus' career. The paragraphs are almost identical, except for two words. In one of them it says "was killed in an automobile accident" while the other says "died in an automobile accident" (picture below). The Stranger, which says "was killed" was printed first, so the publishing house decided to change it to "died". It's not a huge difference, but enough to be noticeable and I wondered why they did that.
My post is now going to shift and discuss my favorite book that I own: the 150th Anniversary Edition of Alice and Wonderland by Lewis Carrol. I have always loved the story of Alice and Wonderland because I thought it was quirky and fun. (On a side note, I would like to point out that I hated the live action version of its with Johnny Depp because it lost its charm and was more action packed than the book). I was in Berlin and went to the Salvador Dali museum, my favorite museum of all time so if anyone goes to Berlin this is a must see, and there was a section that had paintings of scenes from Alice in Wonderland. They were the absolute coolest paintings I had seen. The surrealist portrayal of these scenes really captured the essence of the book. My favorite one was the depiction of the tea party. It was so cool because there is a melting clock, one of Dali's signature paintings, which also reflects the obsession that he characters have with time. Inside of the clock there is a tea set which helps identify the scene. When I got home, I did some research and found out that these paintings were printed in the 150th anniversary edition of the book and I immediately had to buy a used one off of Amazon. Below I attached pictures of some of the paintings from the book.
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