A few days ago, we wrote about The Golden Gate – Vikram Seth‘s novel and Conrad Cummings‘s opera.
Now John McMurtrie of the San Francisco Chronicle‘s book section has sent us a heads-up about a Sunday feature on his cyberpages. It seems that the beloved backdrop to our Bay Area lives has surfaced as a setting for a lot of book covers, too.
Some of them, he promised us, would be hilarious. We think the cover at left for Jim Brogan‘s A Time to Live takes the biscuit. If it’s really “a time to live,” we’d suggest this fellow get his knickers on. As Mark Twain observed, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” There’s too many of them. It’s an overcrowded market – especially in San Francisco. Besides, it’s chilly on those rocks, year-round.
We’re also intrigued by the subtitle of John Payne‘s Three and Out – “The Saga of a San Francisco Apartment Manager.” We didn’t know it could be that exciting. And what does it have to do with the famous bridge?
One commenter noted that there’s a lot of death in the titles – A Pointed Death, No Rest for the Dead, Murder on the Waterfront, Madness and Murder, Dead Midnight (with a poor, luckless fellow falling off the bridge). Someone is jumping off in Blind Leap, too – and is that blood stain designed to look like a brassiere, or does it merely indicate the mind of the artist? Or this reader? A lot of mystery and detective novels, too. Sex, death, mystery … all of an existential oneness in the everyday lives of San Franciscans.
As for naked people in San Francisco, somebody better tell Mark Abramson that he might want to suggest a different cover for his next book, or perhaps a different designer. Oh, I get it … one’s day, one’s night…
See them all here – clothed and nekkid.
