I recently tumbled an article (via boingboing) called “How the Paperback Novel Changed Popular Literature” that told the story of how Penguin started publishing cheap, little, iconic books in the 1930s and (almost) singlehandedly reignited a popular interest in reading by producing novels that could be had for the price of a pack of cigarettes and could fit in your pocket.

Allen Lane [Penguin's founder] stated that he “believed in the existence…of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.”

The article makes special mention of the role the publisher’s brand played in the success of their paperbacks. The colour-coded covers, clear, bold typeface, and, let’s face it, adorable logo made it a lot less odious to delve into classic and contemporary literature and in their first year of existence, Penguin sold over three million copies of their first ten titles.

Now, this is all very interesting to me personally because my first encounter with Penguin books had nothing at all to do with their early branding (as nice as it was). No, from a very young age, I was exposed to a much different style of Penguin paperback, specifically their Classic and Modern Classic lines. These novels (unlike the earlier colourful versions) had very muted branding and featured covers filled with some related example of fine art (usually a painting, but sculptures and drawings as well). I’ve always been struck by the strange relationship between the art on the cover and the story inside these Penguin books, so I started scanning the few that I had in the hopes of building some kind of archive that could be shared with other Penguin lovers.

Everyone seems to have some of these Penguin editions lying around. If you’ve got any, email me if you’d like to add them, or just holler in the comments.

William Gibson seems to like working in trilogies. There was the Sprawl trilogy (cyberspace, mirror-shaded assassins, AIs gone amok) and the Bridge trilogy (large-scale nanotech engineering, indigents-turned-social revolutionaries, VR). With Spook Country, which continues the same story universe as his earlier Pattern Recognition, Gibson seems to be working towards another. The difference, though, is that where the Sprawl and Bridge novels dealt with near-future dystopias, Spook Country (and its predecessor) explores a world that is decidedly now, its dystopia the one we inhabit everyday.

The novels centres around a set of three vastly different characters who all get caught up in a situation which none of them control, but to which each one is essential. There’s Hollis Henry, an ex-musician on a freelance writing assignment for Node, a magazine which doesn’t, as she can figure, actually exist. There’s Milgrim, a prescription junky who gets accosted by a mysterious G-Man and used for his knack for deciphering obscure Russian SMS encryption techniques. And there’s Tito, member of a quasi-criminal “family” so organized as to be invisible, whose roots stretch back to Castro and the Soviets.

Throughout the intricate and sometimes confusing plot, each one of them illuminates a different perspective on the shared story, so that we, the readers, get a top-down view of a world curiously like our own; one in which the big players, the really big movers and shakers of global power, don’t ever make themselves explicitly known. Instead they work through go-betweens and contract corporate mercenaries, wielding unlimited wealth and state of the art technology in the process. It is into this unseen world that the main characters (who don’t normally inhabit it) are deftly triangulated, each uncovering a different angle, a different motive, a different part of the secret that drives the story.

Of course, befitting Gibson, technology plays a huge part in the narrative, but in Spook Country the crazy-futuristic advanced mind-blowing gear is all stuff we actually have. Like, in real life. Even the delightfully-named (and possibly psychotic) gazillionaire Hubertus Bigend’s mag-lev bed exists somewhere, right now. Yes, there’s cell phones and iPods and wardriving in search of unsecured wifi, but Gibson uses the tech in the story, on the one hand, to reflect our own quotidian use of these gizmos to a degree which many authors neglect and, on the other, to help us realize – in some small way – the fantastic potential of these technologies in contemporary culture.

While it doesn’t have the same sense of futuristic novelty as Gibson’s earlier work, Spook Country is certainly in the same stylistic vein as, say, All Tomorrow’s Parties, but, well, just muted a bit. More realistic. As with Pattern Recognition, this novel doesn’t predict a possible future, it presumes a certain kind of saturated present, where the lines between media and art and politics and business all blur and intermingle. In a certain and highly entertaining respect, this novel speaks to what it means to live in the world we do, where technology plays, perhaps, a bigger part than we want to admit.

That night on the train home her eyes followed me the entire way. Every reflection, every half-glimpsed person shouldering their way out the doors, every hushed conversation was a blink of those green eyes, a whisper through reinforced plexiglass. Instead of my usual, measured glances around the subway car, my head swung wildly, hoping to catch her. When my stop finally came, I rushed out the still-opening doors and ran up the escalator towards street level. I needed out. Needed to breath. Pushing open the station doors was like a bucket of cold water on my face. Lights. People. Traffic. Real wind. This is what I needed now; to lose myself in this above-ground maelstrom of human interaction, this turbulent noise. On the subway, or the bus or the tram, I watch everything and everyone. Out here, I’m safe watching nothing, an anonymous cell in the city, letting it all wash over me.

Oblivious but accommodating to the stalls, hustlers, and general foot traffic around me, I walked up Bonvis Ave. to a little parkette I used to frequent when my people watching was more super than subterranean. I found my bench looking a bit older, a few more tags scrawled on the wobbly slats, and sat down like you would getting into your favourite armchair. I needed to carve out a little bubble of solitude, to process what the fuck had just happened. No one’s ever flipped it on me in quite that way, made me the object of such disconcerting study. I closed my eyes and laid down.

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