Really bad book covers (and books)

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 divorcée 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:

Buy it here

There are approximately a billion of these online - find more here, here, here and here.