The Ugly, Essential Books Edition

On misguided first editions, sentimentality, and house moves.

Reilly Brennan (RPB) co-founded Trucks and is the author of the widely-followed Future of Transportation weekly newsletter. Past contributions to WITI include the Nancy Meyers Leaf Blower Edition.

Reilly here. Packing up all of your books every time you move from house to house offers vinegar clarity about your long-term library intentions. These migrations of ours force decisions. If that old Clive Cussler hardcover you’ve never read weighs in at two pounds, it might as well weigh 20, and should probably be tossed into the donation bin. And yet, if you’re anything like me, it comes with you every time.

Why is this interesting?

Why do we keep some books over the long run, and what makes them worth keeping? I save flappy paperbacks with split spines because of what they meant to me 30 years ago. But, I’m also holding onto beautiful art books for decades that I’ve barely read (but displayed pompously). Somehow this stuff all made it into the ark. When we moved across the country a few years ago, none of the decisions I made about books made any sense, but each one felt critical.

It would be great if all the important books also looked the best, but like dogs or bartenders this is usually not the case. In our matrix, there is a category lurking in the lower right: long-term keeper books that are under-designed and sometimes a bit embarrassing to display, yet personally very important. 

In my shelves, one of these has a title so upsetting I covered its spine with duct tape and wrote my own instead (see below). The best are as ugly as they are essential. These ‘nasties’ of a bookshelf remain because they are for us and (usually) nobody else. 

Here are a few of my most embarrassing favorites:

Reilly Brennan

Book: ‘Up and to the Right’ by Richard Stiennon. 

Why: This is the most useful text ever written if you want to understand how to talk to analysts (like the people who work at Gartner and Forrester) so that they put your company on their disproportionately influential lists and charts. But it looks like something from the self-publishing section of Amazon.

Book: ‘Anecdotal British Strategies for Exponential Financial Growth’ by Felix Dennis – just kidding. This book is actually titled ‘How to Get Rich’ but the title is so offensive I covered the whole thing in duct tape and printed my own title instead.

Why: One of the funniest how-I-did-it autobiographies about building a media business.

Book: ‘Junk to Gold’ by Willis Johnson

Why: This is the story of how Willis Johnson started Copart, one of the great high-margin businesses of the auto industry. As business stories go it is a bodice-ripper. Consider a world where Earnest Shackleton was born in Oklahoma and went into the junkyard business. I can confirm it is the ugliest book I’ve ever seen.

To share the blame, I asked other friends of WITI to tell us about their beautiful, ugly and essential books that they’re taking with them for life. 

Edith Zimmerman

Book: ‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot (Wordsworth Classics edition)

Why: Middlemarch was one of the most pleasurable reading experiences of my life. But the more I read, the weirder the cover image seemed. As my mom put it one day, aghast, "Dorothea would NEVER wear that!!" At the time, I thought, Well, it's probably Rosamond. But once I finished the book, I had to agree: It seems wrong to put someone other than Dorothea on the cover, but Dorothea wouldn't be caught dead in something so garish. It's also just a bizarrely cheesy image in general. If George Eliot saw it, she'd definitely be like "LMAO, WTF is this??"

Rick Webb

Book: ‘The Trouser Press Record Guides’ by Ira A. Robins

Why: The spines are broken, they’re too big to comfortably read, the covers are ugly, they don’t match, and they’ve been rendered obsolete by the internet. But you will pull these seminal guides to underground music from my cold, dead hands. For the number of life-changing bands that these books alerted me to, I will forever be in debt to the mysterious Ira A. Robins. Oh, and the text is too small to read.

Nick Parish

Book: ‘The Art of Shen Ku: The First Intergalactic Artform of the Entire Universe’ by Zeek

Why: I’m a sucker for personal encyclopedias (encyclopediae?). This autodidact’s compilation of every sort of traveling wisdom, from seafaring to Eastern medicine to martial arts, scratches my deepest and most wholesome Britannica-meets-The-American Boy’s Handy Book itch. Clearly the product of both imaginary and real voyages, it's loaded with comic illustrations and a childlike perspective on topics both grave and goofy. The almost perverse innocence at play includes a typesetting in Comic Sans and an extra-large dollop of woo and cartoony racism, relegating this tome to my basement shelves. The great millennial upheaval taking place immediately after its September 1, 2001 publication date may have prevented the artform from intergalactic popularity, at least thus far. But, Zeek, if you’re out there: we the believers are ready, if cringing a little.

Todd Osborn 

Book: ‘The Princess Bride’ by William Goldman

Why: This is the first paperback printing of the Princess Bride, rocking this weirdo cover. I think the cover is great but has nothing to do with the insides of that book - I think everybody knows the Princess Bride by now. This cover was deleted after a couple weeks because the publisher, Ballentine, thought it was totally inappropriate for the younger fantasy market they were trying to cater to. I always wondered what my perception of the story would've been if I had looked at this cover while reading the book before ever seeing the movie.

Quick links: 

• The Harvard ‘5-Foot Shelf’

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Reilly (RPB) 

Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) with editing help from Louis Cheslaw about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.