Smashing Specs

It's variations on a theme time. The first cover I can recall that made use of smashed spectacles was the "educational edition" of William Golding's Lord of the Flies that we all read in high school.



Flies is, by the way, an end-of-the-world novel, though not normally remembered as such: the reason the boys are flying over the island, before their crash, is that they have been packed off by their parents to save them from a massive nuclear war.

Anyway, in recent years, these spectacles (usually broken) have been cropping up again and again, each time on the cover of a book concerned with the fate of various more-or-less innocents at the hands of the Nazis.





The Guardian might call Liquidation a powerfull book, by the way, but my own relative disappointment with it leads me to suggest you read Imre Kertész's The Pathseeker instead, which is a very nifty little book.