30 April 2012

POD Cover of the Month: Special Montreal Edition



An ambulance races a sedan in the Grand Prix, a female Olympian takes aim in the War of 1812, Vancouver thrives in the Canadian Arctic... Seem familiar? All were featured in a post published here some six months ago about the whacky Wikipedia packages put together by Alphascript, Betascript and other imprints of Germany's VDM Publishing.

Montreal Aquarium is graced with the publisher's latest series design. Attractive, I suppose, but not so captivating as this image of a man waiting impatiently for the October Crisis to end.


Time moves much more slowly as a child. In my mind the October Crisis consumed much of third grade. Police cars crawled as I walked the five blocks to elementary school, but the real drama and horror played on stages public, private and hidden several kilometres from my Beaconsfield home.


One of Montreal's older suburbs, Beaconsfield had a certain beauty, but looked nothing like a Mediterranean town. And this isn't Montreal:


Nor is this:


Three decades ago, I left Beaconsfield for the city. I never imaged Montreal would give birth to the world's greatest band, or that another of its suburbs would inspire a song played around the world.


Arcade Fire are big – so big that Betascipt has begun offering books devoted to each of their songs... well, the songs that have Wikipedia articles anyway.

Betascript's 116-page Wake Up (Arcade Fire Song) can be purchased through Amazon.ca. Price:  $50.56.


2 comments:

  1. I think my favorite part of two of these covers is the exclamatory enticement "High Quality Content by Wikipedia articles!" Oy. Somehow I missed last year's post about these.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Enticing, indeed... though I note that it doesn't feature on their new cover design. Never mind, it wasn't quite correct to describe the content as being "by Wikipedia articles".

    And what about those credits? Lambert M. Surhone, Mariam T. Tennoe and Susan F. Henessonow had nothing to do with Wake Up (Arcade Fire Song). Credit properly belongs to Wikipedians like Wolfer68, Spin Boy 11 and Freaky4jesus32.

    ReplyDelete