Occasionally I buy a second copy of a book I already own because a particular design seems so at odds with the book I thought I knew. That's the case with this 1976 American paperback reprint of Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper, the musings of a restless London secretary between the wars, first published in England in 1936. The American publisher, Popular Library, has renamed Smith's book Work It Out for Yourself (her original subtitle), and given it an impressively anachronistic women's-lib-era cover featuring a model in a t-shirt whose iron-on letters announce the new title. This repackaging of Novel on Yellow Paper is at once all wrong, and absolutely right, testifying to the enduring challenge that an unconventional, uncategorizable heroine presents to publishers and marketers.
by Heather O'Donnell