Gradient Paperback’s
, 2016
5- Gradient painted book jacket's (new) on vintage paperback's with drawn faces (blk. Sharpie), 2016,
Each paperback from Rob Pruitt's personal library (ex-libris stamp inside), All books come with a 8.5 x 11 in. image printed on Epson archival paper autographed by Rob Pruitt for provenance. EACH UNIQUE.
Don't judge a book by its cover, but go ahead and judge it by its dust jacket. Rob has taken all the left over books from our closed down book store and made dust jackets for them. A quick hand drawn face on a background of emotionally expressive color recalls one of Robs signature painting projects. (The De La Cruz Collection, Miami)
1.) "Beyond Beef", 1993, Paperback by Jeremy Rifkin, First printing, Published by Penguin Group.
Review from Publishers Weekly: Cattle and other livestock consume more than one third of the world's grain while billions of people go hungry. Meanwhile, affluent Americans, Europeans and Japanese gorge on beef and increasingly die from heart disease, cancer and other diseases closely correlated with consumption of meat and dairy products.
Rifkin ( Entropy ) drives home the moral paradoxes inherent in this situation in a timely, tremendously important book that ranks with Peter Singer's Animal Liberation and John Robbins's Diet for a New America as a call to nutritional sanity, environmental ethics and awakened conscience. The chapter on lax inspection procedures and abysmal conditions in slaughterhouses is shocking. Backed by persuasive evidence, Rifkin states that cattle are a major cause of pollution, deforestation, desertification and, through the methane they produce, global warming. Charting the human-bovine relationship from the Lascaux caves to the junk-food hamburger, he suggestively argues that beef-eating has helped support male dominance, gender and class hierarchies, and myths of meat as a sign of strength and virility.
2.) "Pudd'n Head Wilson", 1972, Paperback by Mark Twain, Published by Harper and Row.
Here is a review from The Bookman in 1895: Every scientific experiment or discovery of direct human import is soon followed by fiction of which it forms the basis. That the finger-print method of identification has not sooner provided the matter of a tale is surprising. Mark Twain uses it here ingeniously. "Pudd'nhead" is another name for fool; it is applied hastily to Mr. David Wilson, a lawyer and surveyor, who in his leisure hours amuses himself with making "records" of the finger tips of his acquaintances. In the case of two children born on the same day, and bearing a strong resemblance to each other, one a child of consequence, the other the child of a slave girl, he made continuous records. Then one of them, the wrong one of course, was sold with the slave mother. The reader can develop the story from that point, or if not, Mark Twain will do it for him. As the mistake lasts for twenty-three hard years, in spite of Pudd'nhead Wilson's cleverness, the end is prevented from being a very cheerful one.
3.) "Babbitt", 1961, Paperback by Sinclair Lewis, Published by Signet Classics
Babbitt was ranked #47 on The Guardian's list of the 100 best novels: Babbitt, dedicated to Edith Wharton, was published in the same year as Ulysses (No 46 in this series) and likewise explores the passage through life of a middle-aged man. Coincidentally, the opening chapters follow the eponymous house agent's life during a single day. However, George F Babbitt, a self-intoxicated bully from the fictional city of Zenith, is a world away from Dublin's childless cuckold, Leopold Bloom. Similarly, Babbitt, a satire on 20s America by the controversial Sinclair Lewis, was a bestselling entertainment (the antecedents of which are found in Mark Twain, No 23 in this series) with an artistic intention far removed from Joyce's "silence, exile and cunning".
4.) "Ida", 1968, Paperback by Gertrude Stein, Published by Vintage Books.
From a book review in NY times: Stein constructs a cubist portrait or skewed biography of Ida, who was born with a twin, Ida-Ida, to kind parents. “It was a nice family but they did easily lose each other. . . . Her parents went off on a trip and never came back. That was the first funny thing that happened to Ida.” Odd, sad and happy events populate the novel’s pages, while doppelgängers lurk everywhere: Ida becomes Winnie, because she’s winning; characters like parents to Ida come and go, and men who may, or do, become her husbands appear, disappear, reappear. Ida herself leaves and returns, often going to another state (either a place or a frame of mind). A reader experiences the pull of freedom, and Ida’s contradictory desires — wanting a home, needing to escape; wanting to be known and not. Her identity is in doubt and it’s not.
5.) "Idiots First", 1967, Paperback by Bernard Malamud.
From a NY times article on Malamud: Mr. Malamud was considered by many critics to be one of the finest contemporary American writers. The critic Robert Alter said that stories like "The First Seven Years", "The Magic Barrel", "The Last Mohican", "Idiots First" and "Angel Levine" will be read ''as long as anyone continues to care about American fiction written in the 20th century.'' 1967 Dell