Oh, look, it's a catalog that wants to sell me leather-bound copies of "the classics." Okay, then! What should I buy? This isn't just your ordinary collection of highbrow favorites with which to line your mahogany bookshelves in the Adam-style library, you know. There's more than the complete works of Charles Dickens and William Faulkner here. There's collections focusing on the Great Philosophers, the Civil War, and biographies or memoirs of all the Presidents. There's an illustrated Jane Austen collection which quite captures my fancy. There's leather enveloping almost every book that's ever made it onto a Top 100 list or been designated "timeless" by someone on A&E. Moby Dick! Crime and Punishment! Huckleberry Finn! The Odyssey!
20 Years of Garfield!
Yes, really. There's a leather-bound, finely crafted volume of Garfield comics on offer in this catalog. I blanch to think that anyone would consider Garfield fine art.
The oddest grouping in here, though, is one of the two collections of science fiction. Now, sf is a topic I am rather intimately acquainted with, having read the stuff faithfully for the last 30 years or so. The catalog promises 50 of the greatest works of science fiction ever written (tastefully bound in leather, of course) in the "Masterpieces of Science Fiction" collection. I cast my eye over the titles visible on the spines, and note I've read all of them: LeGuin, Dick, Silverberg, Asimov, etc. I'd certainly have chosen all of those authors, though not necessarily the novels selected. Then I see something touted as the most important new works of science fiction by the world's greatest science fiction writers, and I look at who's represented.
I haven't read any of the books. Heck, I can't identify some of the authors based on the titles in the photograph. I'm surprised, and dubious about the strange definitions of important and greatest as applied to this genre. Really, although Joan Vinge has written some decent books I can't quite see how her most recent novel could possibly be considered important already. The same for Anne McCaffrey's Chronicles of Pern; I'm sorry, no matter how much fun it might be to read, it's the same old dragon world she's been writing about for the last 20 years. It's not groundbreaking. Maybe they should have called these the Masterpieces of Cozy Books about Dragons and Spaceships by Some Authors You've Heard of and Quite a Few You Haven't.
That Garfield book is looking better all the time.
