Furthermore, since Collins is one of those perceptive people of hair-trigger mind and synapse who seek and find evoking connections and reconciliation in even the most disparate of affairs, we get a bonus round as he recalls this “notion that our bodies are as frail as glass containers” in Elinor Wylie’s 1925 fable The Venetian Glass Nephew and further traces the issue to “the literary freak show” in Britain called The Wonderful Magazine that once had an account of “one who thought his posteriors were made of glass; so that all he did he performed standing; fearing, that if he should sit down, he should break his bottom.”
Sometimes, the title tells you all you need to know, or perhaps a furtive glance inside would satisfy your inquisitiveness about never-to-be-a-major-motion-picture items such as Mary Godolphin’s 1867 tome Robinson Crusoe, in Words of One Syllable, or the 1829 broadsheet called To the Curious: The Word Scissars Appears Capable of More Variations in Spelling Than Any Other, with 480 spellings listed. On the other hand - and even though it turned out to be a hoax - you know you have to take more than a sneak peek at something titled I Was Hitler’s Maid, Pauline Kohler’s 1940 memoir.
On the subject of reusing and recycling paper, more than the curiosity factor comes into play when Collins describes the events of 1814 when an American printer gave up on publishing the porn novel Fanny Hill, selling the paper to another printer who marbled over the sheets for a rather unsuccessful and ultimately embarrassing printing that didn’t quite take. The result of which turned out to be a rather unexpectedly embellished account of the War of 1812: Barbarities of the Enemy, Exposed in A Report of the Committee of the House of Representatives. Let's just say that an exposure of a different kind was the result.
In addition to learning about the four unloved genres that make up one of the banes of today's secondhand dealer’s existence — textbooks, theology, celebrity autobiography, and military history — Collins explores the fascinating telltale psychology behind dust jackets. Amongst the varying “implicit codes” is the notion that raised lettering, metallic lettering, or raised metallic lettering indicates an "easy-to-read work on espionage, romance, celebrity, and/or murder.” However, in some kind of harmonic cover convergence of sorts, Collins indicates that on “Serious Books and Crap alike there will be a head shot of The Author sitting still while looking pensive or smiling faintly into the indeterminate distance--the one pose that has no existence in the author’s actual daily life.” I find that smoking a pipe works, too - even with the women writers.
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