AbeBooks likes to create provocative lists. Not a bad concept, as the intriguing, enticing, and plain old interesting is necessary to entice e-newsletter subscribers to follow the email or newsletter links to the respective websites these days. Besides the tabulation of rare book sales and tracking of highest prices, AbeBooks makes dozens of other lists. And they’ll email them to you, if you like. I like.

The latest two lists they sent me — the “30 Novels Worth Buying for the Cover Alone” & “Top 10 Funniest Books According to the British” — got me to follow the links and peruse their selections. Some observations:

Of the 30, I disagree. My reactions:

• only Rant does anything for me; it’s the only cover that calls to me. I had never seen this particular cover before, but I would definitely have picked it up in the store. If I was in that section. I’m told it’s a book to read, and perhaps someday I will, though I’m not really into modern American anti-culture reading. But the cover works very well for me.
• only The River Wife and The Archivist seem perfect, and the second is distinctly inferior to the first. I would pick up The River Wife out of a curiosity to discover if cover and story match. The Archivist cover, while fitting, tells me absolutely nothing – other than possibly that the story occurs in a more modern setting.
• I’ve seen 8 of these cover before, in either a brick- or click- ‘n’ mortar store, and only picked up Sharp Teeth
• I haven’t bought any of these; probably won’t.
• I own A Clockwork Orange – picked up free in a discard donation pile along with 3 or 4 other Burgess titles…that have a very strong chance of never being read by me.
• I don’t take to the Seamus Heaney-translated Beowulf cover, though I’m told the book is worthy.
• with no bravado, I am confident I could create a much better list of 30 novel covers that were worth buying based on cover alone – and exclusively of genre titles. In fact, I think I could make two, a combined list of the adventure genres (fantasy, mystery, horror, science fiction, historical fiction) and a list of just fantasy titles. None of the title from AbeBooks would appear on either.

Of the 10:

• I know of 6
• I own 2
• I’ve read 1
• I find it interesting that Catch-22 outranks The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – the 2 titles I own. I’ll let you guess which one I’ve read.

So. AbeBooks is doing at least one thing correctly: marketing. They’re promoting themselves and their services enough to get me to and in their front door. Now they just need to convince me to leave with something in my hand.