This started out being a post on bad pulp novel covers. I kept running into books that were awful even if the covers weren't that interesting, though, so the end result is something of a mixed bag.
When I was growing up my father had boxes of
lurid hard-boiled detective novels in the basement, and I read a
lot of them. Many of them were cheaper than 25 cents (as some of these apparently cost) and were known as "dime novels", and a lot of them had two novels in one book - if you flipped the book over and upside-down the second novel would now be the front of the book. Anyone else remember these?
“This novel probes a mounting social problem. Can the young divorcĂ©e return to a normal existence – or will she always be any man’s target?”:
This is in a category by itself: an 8th grade Serbian biology textbook from 1998 which for some reason features Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter from
Raising Arizona.
From 1983 - FORTH was an early programming language:
There are approximately a billion of these online - find more
here,
here,
here and
here.