Today, a Flickr set. SciFi Book Cover Pool – book covers from the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s.
This site is a total time suck, featuring hundreds (thousands) of book covers that you may recognize or even have in your own collections.
You may just find that long-lost read you’ve been looking for – or you may just decide to wallow in all of the fantastical, other-worldly art.
I find that some book covers, particularly those for books I purchased new, engender strange feelings and memories. Given the right cover, I can be instantly transported back to those early days, remembering the story, where I purchased the book, where I read it, the friends I had back then, the places I lived, what I was doing. (It’s very strange to look at say, the cover of Clarke’s Childhood End for the edition I purchased new, and suddenly finding myself remembering a street hockey game that took place in the shadow of the Philadelphia Flyer’s Stanley Cup championships…remembering saves I made while in goal, my teammates pushing for the win, and watching Bernie Parent, the Flyer’s number 1 goalie, cutting the grass on his lawn – he lived, as did most of the players, in my neighborhood – …remembering the ice cream parlor we all went to after the game…remembering the silly, trash-talk nicknames we gave to opposing players…remembering imagining what it would be like to see the Overlord’s ships hovering overhead all during that hard-fought hockey game.
Nostalgia. It’s bittersweet.
Go get your own.
