Paperback 765: 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft / Tuli Kupferberg & Robert Bashlow (Grove / Evergreen Black Cat BC-140)

Paperback 765: Grove Press / Evergreen Black Cat BC-140 (3rd ptg, 1969)

Title: 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft
Authors: Tuli Kupferberg & Robert Bashlow
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $20


Best things about this cover:

• Well, that's one way.
• This cover is simultaneously horrifying and hilarious (the latter by juxtaposition with the title). Contorted body is one of the most monstrous human figures I've ever seen. 
• Found this little book jammed in among a ton of other old paperbacks on a cart outside Falling Leaves in Ithaca last weekend.
• This book is literally a numbered list of 1001 ways to beat the draft. There are illustrations and documents interspersed throughout. It's a very, very serious joke, this book. 

Best things about this back cover:

• Kill for Peace
• If LBJ got drafted …
• Signature is a nice touch

Page 123~ (pages are unnumbered, so here is a sampling of Ways to Beat the Draft)

11. Start to menstruate (better red than dead)
479. Contemplate the horror of murder
480. Sleep late with your warm girlfriend
782. Be so ugly you fail even Army standards
4. Die 

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]

Paperback 654: Virginia Woolf / Monique Nathan (Grove/Evergreen P34)

Paperback 654: Evergreen Profile Book P34 (PBO, 1961) (trans. from Fr.)

Title: Virginia Woolf
Author: Monique Nathan (trans. Herma Briffault)
Cover artist: photo cover

Yours for: $14


Best things about this cover:

• I got this only because it seemed so unusual—a picture-heavy mass-market paperback bio of a major English author (and not a more likely subject for such a book, such as, say, Shaun Cassidy or Justin Bieber).
• Then again, Grove Press was doing experimental, off-beat stuff all the time.
• "Endpapers" are photos of waves.
• There really are a shit-ton of b&w photos, and a short anthology of Woolf's work at the back.
• Inscription: "For Kay from Mrs. Watson / 1964"; there's a whole novel right there.

Best things about this back cover:

• Bah!

Page 123~

To find it good, lacking fame, to cloak oneself in proud solitude is not always merely a theatrical attitude. 

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]

Paperback 561: GI Rights and Army Justice: The Draftee's Guide to Military Life and Law / Robert S. Rivkin (Grove B-258)

Paperback 561: Grove B-258 (1st ptg, 1970)

Title: GI Rights and Army Justice: The Draftee's Guide to Military Life and Law
Author: Robert S. Rivkin
Cover artist: Jules Feiffer

Yours for: $11
Best things about this cover:

• I hope the resolution on this image is good enough for you to see the G.I. being crushed by the title. Huddled up and anxious. What a great Vietnam-era, counterculture book this is.
• Love the Red White and Blue *on black* color scheme—it essentially says "your country is great because it has laws that will protect you even though your country is doing Terrible things in southeast Asia."
• Jules Feiffer! I probably got this book just because the art was by him.
• Grove Press fought really important legal battles against censorship in the '50s and '60s after publishing banned books like "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and "Tropic of Cancer," among others. For more info, see the entertaining 2008 documentary "Obscene."

Best things about this back cover:

• A.C.L.U.—the renegade publisher's best friend.
• "Minus Its Couth" is a strange, fantastic phrase.
• The black cat logo is so super-awesome that I want it on a t-shirt, like, right now.

Page 123~

However, treason may be committed only in time of a declared war and must involve something more than merely expression.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]