I took this photo when I visited the pop-up library in Selfridges earlier this year. As someone who studied English for as long as possible, I love books for their words; but as someone who brainstormed designs for books in my last job, I also love books for their covers. There are a few books that I have more than one copy of, simply because they have such great covers. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the main culprit.
But there are others, like J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (one of my top five books), where I nearly always see the same cover, no matter which library or bookshop I go to. There is something comforting in seeing a new copy of the book which looks exactly the same as the one I bought almost twenty years ago.
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
The Catcher in the Rye
