Topical Guide 156
Mark Dorset
Books: Covers
Mitgang, a sociologist with psychohistorical interests, moved to Babbington just a year or so before I was born. Passing himself off as a psychosocial historiographer, Mitgang undertook a two-year study of the sexual practices of Babbingtonians. … When he had gathered the material he needed, Mitgang disappeared. A couple of years later, he published the results of his research under the title Seafood and Sex: a Study of Life in a Coastal Town. … Seafood and Sex has been out of print for years, but if you take the trouble to track down a copy, you will understand why it quickly became a best-seller and why the book itself became a primary reason for Babbington’s rapid growth.
Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home”
Well, I’ve taken the trouble to track down a copy, and I think I’ve spotted an additional reason for Peter’s animosity toward the work: whoever designed the cover chose Botticelli’s Birth of Venus as a handy way of communicating “sex” and “seafood,” but the painting is utterly inappropriate to Babbington, since it depicts Venus emerging from, or surfing in on, a scallop shell rather than a clam shell! A certain segment of the population of Babbington must have been deeply offended.
At the time, the clammies claimed that runoff from the chicken farms was fouling the bay, and there was probably some truth to the claim, but it was not the real reason for the animosity that they felt toward the chicken farmers. I think we can find the real reason if we read between the lines of a passage in Our Town and Its People, a social studies text that all fifth-grade Babbingtonians were required to study, a text commissioned by the Daughters of the Tong Wars.
Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home”
Our Town and Its People was easier to find. The Babbington Town Library had a copy. The cover illustration in this case is a detail of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s The Dutch Proverbs, showing approximately the rightmost one-third of the painting. I see fish, and fisherfolk, and an eel, and (in the lower right corner) what looks to me like a walking chicken egg—but where are the clams? Well, this may be a stretch, but in the extreme upper right corner, below the last letter of the title, there is a figure crouched in shallow water who seems to be scratching for clams at the bottom of Bolotomy Bay. (See the closeup below the full-cover image.)
Is this a clamdigger going after the elusive bivalve with his bare hands?
See also: Clamming: Methods of TG 21; Cover Illustrations TG 18, TG 61
[more to come on Tuesday, December 21, 2021]
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