The Crying of Lot 49
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Bantam Books, 1967 (1st Paperback Printing). Softbound. In his intro to Slow Learner, a collection of his early stories, Pynchon, in a unique instance of autobiographical divulgence, calls The Crying of Lot 49 a book 'which was marketed as a "novel," and in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up until then.' This first paperback edition features an uncredited Peter Max–inspired cover that foregoes the postal horn in favor of an image worthy of the Sunset Strip curfew riots: a groovier-than-life Oedipa Maas doing the Jerk amid the etheric paisley. 'She had looked down at her feet,' Pynchon writes, referencing the Remedios Varo painting, Bordando el Manto Terrestre (Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle), 'and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape.'
