HDM

For that large senior seminar capstone paper, I bought a lovely set of His Dark Materials trilogy in paperback. There is no way I can bring myself to write in my hardcover editions, particularly as The Golden Compass was a gift :) When I went to the bookstore (yes, it is one of those dreaded chain stores, but I can't help that we don't have lovely little options close to home), I was surprised to discover that the books were definitely not in the teen/young adult section. So I had to ask for help, which I rarely ever do in a store or otherwise, and found that the trilogy was located in the children's section as well as the adult science fiction section. Slightly odd locations in my opinion, since they weren't also in the middle YA shelves. And because I am a nerd, I was very interested in the different editions: the kids' books had the original US cover illustrations, but in the adult section there were two main options: mass market paperback (they had boring cover desings and I shunned these books for the small, smearable print and the tiny margins) and my final choice of the nicer, cleaner, crisper paperback. After doing a bit of reading on Pullman's website, the selling point for me was that this new edition had all the original British-edition illustrations and epitaphs. Although, now the dilemma is that I won't want to write in these books either :)