Worlds of Paul Jessup

This book is beautiful. I love getting collector’s editions of books, they remind me what treasures books can be.  This has a wonderful dust jacket, a really cool looking sign in sheet, excellent layout and design and printed on quality paper that will last generations.  Collectors editions of books really enforce the idea of book as object, and is not something that can be replicated with etext at all.  It is the way, I think, of a book’s survival in the up coming etext market (which, give about 10-20 more years, we’ll see books fading away and becoming collector’s items and text becoming more of an electronic commodity…the Internet is paving the way for this to happen).

Of course, that etext market will look nothing like we envision it *now*, but that’s just a side note.  This is an amazingly beautiful book, and it is one that I can see passing down through generations.  It sits on my bookshelf right now with all my other signed, collectible books.

The text inside the book, the story itself, is also fantastic.  A really intense, quick read that kept me up last night later than I wanted to.  It’s dark, searing, and philosophical (in a questioning of theology sort of way) and never offers any easy answers.  In short- it’s like a punch to throat followed up by discussion of the nature of being.