Culture

Please Enjoy These Old-Timey Kids Books Photoshopped To Have Much Better Titles

Everyone loved the Sweet Valley High classic 'We Ate Our Parents'.

by Alex McKinnon  7 April 2016

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Our ongoing effort to catalogue every corner of Good Twitter (there are not many, so it’s pretty easy) has yielded some stellar results in the last few months. An exhaustive stocktake of all the weird shit you can buy at Aldi? Check. A foul-mouthed Paul Kelly parody account that’s fixated on gravy? Right here. Flimsy puns on celebrity names accompanied by Photoshopped images of said celebrities wearing houses on their heads? You got it.

The latest addition to this small but vitally important online genre is Paperback Paradise. Selling itself as “the world’s #1 used bookstore,” Paperback Paradise takes those old-timey kids books you devoured as a child as its inspiration — think the Hardy Boys, the Baby-Sitters Club, the Sweet Valley High series. Those old Scholastics and Bantam-Skylarks had some truly weird shit on their covers. All Paperback Paradise is doing is correcting the record.

I read all these books in school. I kept ‘We Ate Our Parents’ under my pillow when I slept. These books were my best friends.

The jury’s still out on my favourite, but ‘Wrestle Me for America You Thieving White Shit’ has gotta be up there.