Really excited to find this web-site showing all different covers of Catcher in the Rye, one of my favorite books. An old-school web-site, but a good visual collection, even including books from other countries.

There actually aren’t any spectacular covers for Catcher, even though it’s such a great book. I’m not sure why it hasn’t been redesigned recently? I do like the one shown here in the bottom left (look! he’s wearing the red hat and catching someone!), and I think the poorly-spaced, poorly-written quote on the signet book is funny (“This unusual book may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart — but you will never forget it”).

Obviously, I’m on a book-kick these days. If you’ve been at all enamored with the book world, especially at the end of 2007, you’ll know that The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is getting some hardcore attention from book-lovers. I have a little Diaz-love myself, partially because the man got his MFA at my alma mater and I read a chunk of his work in the happy days I spent there.

There are two things I want to mention about this book besides it being fabulous to read:

1. It won the 2008 Tournament of Books (yeah, who cares about that Pulitzer it won), an awesome contest I discovered through the Penguin Book Blog. Approximately twenty books are paired off. Judges (usually established writers) read the pair and deem a winner, and then pairs are made of the winners, and so on, until a final winner is decided. For me, this is much better than sports.
2. You’ve gotta love that cover. First of all, splats amuse me to no end (especially when they look like they were really, accidentally spilled over the actual cover/page/label/whatever). Splatters are supposed to be spread randomly, but can look really awful if you really do just spread them randomly, and that’s what makes them somewhat difficult to create. Second of all, splats that look like something else (or two other things, as it may be) amuse me even more. In summary, splats are one of those things that are hard to pull off, but when they look cool, they look cool (see above).