These are the three versions of the book I have.

The hotel I grew up in had a drugstore next door, and it had a rack of magazines, plus one of those revolving metal displays with paperbacks.

When the items didn’t sell, the druggist had only to tear off their covers and send them back to the distributor to get credit. The de-covered remains went into his garbage . . .

. . . which my sister and I raided regularly. I saved the fairly salacious “true crime ‘n’ sex” tabloids for the occasional visit from my mom, and Sis took the romances, but all the science fiction was mine.

So I ended up with a bunch of paperbacks with their front covers torn off. What to do? Rebind them with a bit of cloth, cardboard, paper, flour paste, and elbow grease. A particular favorite, cleverly rebound in orange cloth:

Notice my attention to detail:

What IS very surprising is that even with flour paste, most of the bindings are absolutely fine after 40+years.

On first reading the book, I was extremely annoyed by the Nadsat (mostly Russian-derived slang) and not knowing the exact meaning of each word, but this copy had a handy glossary, so I started to annotate it:

That quickly became tiresome, so I just went with the flow . . . you can get enough of the sense from the context, and the exact meaning is pretty much irrelevant. Although this is sort of an artificial example, it was my first inkling that authors can deliberately use ambiguity as part of their style.

The second one is from a trip to Spain in 1982.

I never got through it, my poor Spanish plus Nadsat, although in retrospect the translations are pretty obvious (droogs -> drugos, rassoodocks -> rasodoques).

The third I bought before seeing the movie.

It’s the script of the film, heavily illustrated with stills. 13 y.o. old me was madly in lust with bad boy Alex, especially when he got naked:

At that age I missed some of Kubrick’s humor.

-R