Hello again, friends. Yes, it’s time for another HELLA AWESOME BOOK COVER.
This one was entirely stolen from a friend, so THANKS FOR DONATING LOL. And it’s a great one!
_____B’s Guide to Beating and Picking Up - Veronica Heath
Aha, the cover for this book is partially obscured. Very nice. I just love a challenge on this blog. So I welcome the attempt at obfuscation. But, upsettingly, it looks like the little label is actually also the full name of the book.
Pro tip chaps, if you wanna throw me off the scent of a good book cover (perhaps by writing the cover in Swedish, putting stickers all over it, or using absolute nonsense), don’t go with the ol’ “cover the name of the book up with a smaller handwritten version of the name of the book” trick. It just won’t slow me down.
Thus, I can reveal with absolutely no difficulty beyond slightly zooming in, that the full title of the book is: THE NOB’S GUIDE TO BEATING AND PICKING UP.
Oh boy, this book just got a hundred times more hilarious.
The Nob’s guide to beating. A guide to beating. For Nobs? By Nobs? What’s the meaning of this, exactly?
The apostrophe in “Nob’s” is possessive, implying that this is the guide of-or-from The Nob. But what or what is Nob. The definite article ‘The’ preceding ‘Nob’ suggests it’s some institution or well-known figure (like ‘The BBC’, or ‘The Rock’). But I’ve never heard of this… Nob. Is it the guy on the cover? Is HE Nob?
No. The logo slightly to the left of the title reveals all. It’s the National Organisation of Beaters and Pickers Up. Or NOBPU for short. But they just shortened it to NOB for some reason.
Why wouldn’t they want to be called NOB PU? What do they have to be ashamed of? C’mon NOBPU!
Also, going with just NOB means the poor Pickers Up don’t get any representation whatsoever. And they work so hard, going around, picking things up. But NOBPU seems like a decent group. It’s purpose seems to be “uniting beaters and pickers up across the country.” What a pleasant and innocent-sounding goal. Get those beaters together! Bring them together and let them beat as one! And then do some picking up. Lovely.
Anyway, the main focus of the cover is a man taking a pheasant from a dog’s mouth. So I assume that this some kind of game hunting manual involving dogs as retrievers.
But how hard can these things be? Is the occupation of beating grass to drive birds into the air, and then picking up birds after they’ve been shot SO complicated that it requires an entire guide?
I reckon I could summarise the full manual in about two sentences:
1. Beat grass until birds fly out.
2. Pick the bird up off the ground. Or from your dog if you have a dog.
It seems they’re missing the crucial, skilful step of actually shooting the bird once it’s in the air. I think that’d be the tricky bit. But what do I know? I’m no Nob!
In conclusion, this book seems incredibly useless. Its only two redeeming features are that it has a dog on the cover, and that talking about beating Nobs is very juvenile but hilarious.
So I’m giving it 2/10.