Hard covers and lack thereof

[pynchonoid]

What he said, plus...

--- Michel Ryckx <mryc2903 at yahoo.fr> wrote:

> French paperbacks usually have an extra firm &
> protective cover -take a 
> Grasset edition, or the NRF books, which is much
> more rare (in my 
> opinion) in UK or US paperbacks.  These books are
> usually printed also 
> with an extra page indent so there is no need to
> fold them open 180 
> degrees.  I've never seen a hardcover published by
> such a fantastic 
> house like Editions de Minuit.  The one exception is
> the house Plon.
> 
> French cookbooks, no surprise (you keep these in the
> kitchen at hand, 
> because these books suffer), are always hardcover
> editions. Non fiction 
> books usually have a hardcover version - my copies
> of Braudel are all 
> hardcover.
> 
> Have a very beautiful Marguerite Yourcenar hardcover
> edition of Mémoires 
> d'Hadrien, published for some special occasion or
> so.


A fine novel, her French is a pleasure to read.


> But a Pléiade book is like the bible: you are not
> supposed to read it, 
> only to possess it and show it to your friends.

Well I do that, too, sort of. My reading version of
Proust is a a one-voume paperback (yes, and a
substantial one it is, tough cover, well-made) edition
of the same text without  all the scholarly apparatus,
from NRF Gallimard - nice to have it all in one volume
although it's a brick. But I take  the Pléiade tomes
down from the shelf when I need to study the notes or
look at one of the alternate versions from an earlier
draft.  Imagine being able to have Gravity's Rainbow, 
plus bound up with it all of Pynchon's significant
earlier drafts of the novel, annotated. Convenient.

Comparable to the Pléiade for American literature,
although the books aren't quite as luxurious (or as
expensive): the Library of America, good texts,
well-bound, nice Bible paper, less scholarly
apparatus, worth owning, imo.  For only about $50,000
you can have a LOA book dedicated to yourself in
perpetuity, too, while keeping it in print, in case
any of you booklovers hit an I.P.O. or inheritance
windfall.

> 
> And last year's Goncourt, Trois jours chez ma mere,
> by Francois 
> Weyergans, is really good - but that was not the
> subject.
> 

Thanks for the heads-up!


> Michel.
> 
> 

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