So, yesterday a couple of friends came over to… well, never mind, that’s not relevant to the post. But, anyway, after we’d accomplished out goals, one of them noticed a book cover open in Photoshop on my computer and asked what I was doing. When I told him I was cleaning it up, he almost had a fit.
He said that all the wear (and that one had a LOT) gave the cover character. And, while I agree with him, some of these are just too fucked to leave the way they are. A lot of the damage is just age, but some is outright vandalism. And I have a lot of things to consider.
First of all, I want the covers to catch people’s eyes on the site. Second, I’m starting an all-out social media campaign and the covers REALLY have to catch people’s eyes… or at least I WAS gearing that up before ‘the recent unpleasantness.’ (back in Louisiana, and I assume the rest of the South, that’s a euphemism for the the Civil War… but I think it fits.)
I want to attract younger people, so they too can know the glories of these books. A lot of us–most of us–love these books because they bring back fond masturbatory memories. The excitement of youth, learning new things, and realizing that there’s a whole world of people who love dicks and perversion as much as we do. Now, we have the internet and billions of porn videos to show us that… but these books are still relevant. Okay, that was a tangent…
Anyway, for a lot of these, cleaning and manipulation are necessary. I don’t know if I want to fuck up the people who did this or the guy who invented the Sharpie… Marking across the face is the WORST thing. The only class in high school I didn’t ace was Art. I barely passed, so this is tough. It’s pretty easy to tell where I just said, “Fuck it! Good enough.” And to the original artist, my most sincere apologies.
Hell, the only artwork I’ve ever displayed publicly would have been seen displayed in rest-areas along I95 and I80.
2 Responses
Lighter fluid is what profession bookstores use to remove black marker marks. I’ve tried it & it works great. Other products like Goo Gone can easily leave an oil stain, but lighter fluid evaporates too quickly. It’s sorta like dry cleaning.
Yeah, I managed bookstores for years. I never liked the Goo Gone. The owner of the first bookstore I worked at showed me how to use a paper towel just dampened with Windex… I still do it that way. Unfortunately, NOTHING gets off Sharpie except Photoshop–especially if I only have an image of the cover 🙂 I think I did a respectable job on the one in the post.
And I hated spending hours trying to fix a Bad Boys cover, because the books usually aren’t very good 🙂