The Startling, Here and Elsewhere

The absorbing blog of amazing photos, If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats, has instituted a new category, for strange book covers. This is to be applauded. Here are their finds from the last 24 hours (I know I first saw the Espionaje cover at 50 Watts). There seems to be a bit of a boobtastic focus so far...

On another tack, can I just say that Erich Kästner's Going to the Dogs, recently resurrected by NYRB with a suitably seedy Christian Schad painting on the front, is one of the most purely enjoyable books I've read all year?

The painting is Schad's 'Self-Portrait with Model' (1927).

Here are a couple of other similarly unnerving Schads: 'Appendectomy in Geneva' and 'Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove' (both 1929).

Click the paintings for much bigger versions.