This was the first image from the project that struck me as really good; so I showed it in a lot of places online, and people there seemed to like it also.
When I first visited the Uncle Hugo’s site after the fire, the rubble of partially-destroyed books was one of the most awful things I’ve ever seen (I’ve been a science fiction fan my whole life, and an Uncle Hugo’s customer and friend of the owner since the 1970s, so this was pretty personal). The whole building burned to the ground, and the rubble collapsed into the basement. This left the top layer being large destroyed books—often still recognizable.
I scanned around with the longest lens I had with me (most of it was far enough away that I couldn’t read book covers with just my eyes), looking for interesting juxtapositions or anything else of photographic interest. There were quite a few recognizable book covers, but none were from books that meant a lot to me personally. But then I saw this, not a cover, but a section of the title page of one of the great books of the genre.
A 13×19 print is really fairly large (despite print sizes having increased tremendously since I was young, at the top end of the market).
