Dover Thirft Editions = Instant Literature Art

I was thinking that I might need to buy some more Dover Thrift Editions to create a frame of cover art from several books. However, I apparently underestimated my own literature-hoarding capacity, since once I gathered them all together I realized that I had these:



Sort of impressive, since I normally buy editions that are higher quality. Dover Thrift are exactly that - thrift items. Classic literature for under $4.00. They're the Happy Meal of books. A drive-thru special. If I want a new copy of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by the illustrious (and alliterative, which I appreciate) James Joyce, I am not going to choose a $1.50 Dover copy when I could get some quality out of my $10 by going with another publisher. One that might provide me with a different font than Times New Roman and might have higher quality paper than the grungy, grey, math class scratch paper bullshit stuff they use in the cheap books.

The moral of the story (no pun intended) is that I've acquired these editions over the years by picking them out of trash bins (literally - at book buyback, college students who paid $3.00 for one of these babies won't be able to have the bookstore buy it back. So they dump it in the trash rather than cart it home at the end of the semester. It's like Christmas for English Literature majors, if you're shameless enough to rifle through the garbage. You saw my pile. So you can see how worried I was about what people were thinking.)

For my "literary art," I arranged them by color so that it seemed vaguely pleasing to look at, and this was the result:



Now all I need is a poster-sized frame from Michael's or JoAnn Fabrics, and I'll be good to go. My sister-in-law and I are going shopping Thursday night after I get out of work. I'm attempting to acquire curtains (or at least rods) for the living room. If I can't find anything good, I'm planning on at least buying some beaded trim for some of our lamps. Drab to Fab, as CG says. ^_^ Night, all.

I leave you with a quote from Joyce.

...they were birds ever going and coming, building ever an unlasting home under the eaves of men's houses and ever leaving the homes they had built to wander... A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the seadusk... -Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man