Call Me Ishmael

So. Let me start by saying that I've read Moby Dick, and I'm not a fan. Man, that Melville could really have used a firmer editorial hand. The book is about 625 pages, depending on your edition and there's really only about 250 pages of story there. Everything else is just minutia...pages and pages of minutia. Was the guy getting paid by the word?

Our friends over at Feeling Stitchy are running a little contest called Covered in Stitches. Essentially, you stitch up the cover of a book. It can be your own design or you can embroider an existing cover, doesn't matter. But it got me to thinking about book covers and cover artwork in general. And I'm going to repeat something I've been saying for years: here in the US, we have terrible taste in cover art. Nothing says "chick lit" faster than a blurry photograph of some cropped body part. But digging through my (massive) book collection tonight, I found a few that stand out:

Why yes, it is Laundry Day...why do you ask?

Uh, yeah...up in the corner of that one photo is....Moby Dick. The cover art is about the only thing that I like about that book. And I like it a lot. In fact, I'm thinking that it may be my entry for the Covered in Stitches contest.