“[R]ight up until the 1930s a speck of colour on the cover was enough to bring all Bloomsbury out in a rash. And pictures? Terribly common! Terribly American! Even the cheap end of the market, including early paperbacks, was dominated by sober affairs: title, publisher, author, a border or two for the flashy. When dust jackets appeared, mostly after the first world war, they were regarded as disposable items to protect the hardback underneath. ‘Keeping the jacket on a book,’ writes Powers, would have been ‘like storing clothes in the carrier bag from the shop where they had been bought.’”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/15/historybooks.features

Moshe Feder comments that the term “science fiction” wasn’t in use when “The Great Gatsby” was first published. (The term was popularized by the publisher Hugo Gernsback in his magazine “Science Wonder Stories” in 1929, though there are isolated earlier occurrences.) So Hemingway couldn’t have thought, in 1925, that the cover reminded him of “a book of bad science fiction”.

Still, there was genre fiction around, dime novels and the like, whose gaudy cover art Hemingway might have been reminded of when he saw the cover of “Gatsby”. Some of it, like the Tom Swift and John Carter series, both of which were published in hardcover, we would now characterize as “science fiction”. So I’m not sure Hemingway is “retrojecting” this comparison. He’s using terminology that wouldn’t then have been available to him, but that accurately reflects his remembered impressions from that time.

Thanks, Moshe.

M.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/business/media/new-great-gatsby-book-carries-a-hollywood-look.html

cites the same Hemingway quote that you liked. When I likewise singled it out on Facebook, a friend pointed out your blog post.

I like what you’ve written about covers and their influence, even though I find the Gatsby cover more appealing than you do. (I completely agree about all the Amis covers.)

However, when you write “It was different for Hemingway back in 1925. Fitzgerald was a new writer, not well-known outside of America. If Hemingway wanted to preserve his rep among the arty denizens of the Left Bank, they couldn’t get the idea that he read (ugh) science-fiction,” I think you’re mistaken.

Hemingway is retrojecting the comparison to SF cover art. It wasn’t a genuine part of his memory of first seeing his friend’s book, it’s a comparison he thought of when writing his memoir. There were no SF hardcovers to speak of back when TGG came out. In fact, even the first SF pulp magazine, AMAZING STORIES, only began publication in 1926. So giving the arty denizens of the Left Bank the impression he read science fiction ( a term that hadn’t been coined yet!) would have taken some doing and certainly couldn’t have been accomplished with the jacket of TGG.

M..

On the other hand, if Hitler had not committed imperial suicide by going to war against the USSR and instead concentrated on deploying a full fledged naval blockade against Britain by building more advanced U-boats and in greater numbers, for example, after a couple of years of privations Churchill would have been voted out of office and his replacement would have sued for peace with Germany (which, if Speer is to be believed was always Hitler’s preferred option for England) the US would then have had no base of operations in Europe and would have been in no position to threaten the Nazi European Union in any meaningful way.

Again in this latter scenario with England out of the equation, if Hitler had still chosen to go to war against the USSR, it would once again have been the best option for the USSR and the US to join forces against Germany. It would have been a very different war, a much longer one and possibly one ending in some kind of a negotiated peace but once again the US and the USSR would have found themselves fighting on the same side against the EU. It would probably have ended with Hitler getting deposed in a coup and the EU suing for peace and reforming.