sholio | ... I don't even know what this is

Crossposts: http://sholio.livejournal.com/439526.html

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... I don't even know what this is

I've seen some really WTF book covers (1970s sci-fi is especially prone to it), and quite a few that seemed to have only the most passing relationship to the book's contents, but I am pretty sure this VERY NOT WORK-SAFE cover of The Princess Bride is the most bizarre, hilarious mismatch of book contents to book cover that I have ever seen.

If I need brain-bleach, so do you!

Not worksafe! Quite porny, in fact! Did I mention this is an actual cover? Of the actual book? Someone was clearly dropping a lot of acid at Ballantine Books in the 1970s. Either that, or my edition of The Princess Bride somehow left out the tentacle rape, skulls, snakes and inappropriate religious imagery. Also I never really imagined Buttercup looking that much like Cher.

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I don't even...

Yeah, that's about where I am too ...

ROFLOL! Oh, that looks like so many of the sci fi and fantasy books I brought home in the 70s and even the 80s. There was a generic template for those books, involving naked women, tentacles, and so on.

But yeah, I have to agree that's a totally bizarre mismatch of a cover. Then again, that's one book where I definitely preferred the movie. ;-)

hahaha, yeah, '70s sci-fi covers explored whole new depths of bad taste. Usually they had at least SOMETHING to do with the contents of the book, though, if only vaguely!

I encountered the book first (as a teenager), and I like them both. I find them both equally fun and entertaining, but in different ways; I like the book's comparative sense of melancholy and gravitas, but I also find the movie incomparably charming.

I have never read The Princess Bride, so I can't judge the mismatch, but maybe it was one of those cases where they fell back to a cover that had been drawn already and held in reserve?