Love is a Pie – Maude Hutchins (New Directions, 1952)

Time to do some more reading, or at least looking at books… This is one of my favourite dust jackets and one that i at first thought would prove to be pretty hard to find. Since i started collecting these i think i’ve seen one copy on ebay but i can’t remember what it sold for. There have also been a few here and there on etsy, amazon and other “book searching sites”. Most of these have been in the range of hundreds of dollars and thus a bit outside my comfort zone.

But a few months ago i saw something on amazon that looked promising. One thing that’s a bit annoying about sites like amazon and abebooks is that you rarely get to see any images of the actual book on the listing so that brings a lot of emailing back and forth before you can actually get to see the item, if you are lucky. I’ve actually had quite a few sellers who for some reason don’t want to send any images, most claim they don’t have the time to do it…

Anyways, this particular seller was very helpful and sent me images right away and it looked good enough for the price they were asking, i think it was $20 or something like that… But then i encountered another potentially big obstacle. For some reason the seller didn’t offer international shipping, i’m guessing it must have something to do with how they registered at amazon once upon a time. No biggie i thought and asked if we could settle the deal outside of amazon but this was not an option for the seller. Once again i’m guessing that like ebay there are strict rules about this and that abuse of the rule can lead to the seller being removed from the marketplace or whatever…

So that forced me to try and find a workaround. I do have a distant relative outside Washington D.C., a cousin to my father or something like that who i’ve visited once a long time ago and who would surely be able to help me should i have asked. However i don’t have an email adress to her and to call or even write her to explain and work this out seemed like it would take to long and i wanted to pick up the book as soon as possible since the price was so good. So then i remembered that at one point in the past i had asked Frank Edwards at warholcovers if i could ship a copy of Both Feet in the Groove via him from a seller on ebay that didn’t offer internationel shipping. As it turned out i didn’t need his help that time since i didn’t win the auction but this time around it seemed like a great solution. As with all members in the “Warhol Covers Club” Frank was very friendly and helpful and told me it was no problem what so ever to ship it to him. Even with the double shipping the total was less than $50 so once again i really consider this a real steal!

Regarding the condition i’d say that it more than met my expectations. There is some general discoloration, a small
piece torn off on the back but all in all nothing major. This is also the first dust jacket that i’ve come across so far that doesn’t credit Warhol with the design in the actual book but New Directions does so on their site and i’ve also read on other places that there is no question whether this is Warhols work or not. There is also a paperback version with the same design (though in black and white) that’s pretty easy to find, there’s a few on ebay right now for example, but for now i’ll stick to hardcovers only.

It’s a great looking dust jacket with a trademark blotted line Warhol design and since i thought i might never find it i was pretty thrilled to actually do so, and offcourse also to get it at such a great price. And thanks again for your help Frank, much appreciated!