I was able to photograph book covers only after I got a digital camera in 2010. I used it to snap pictures of some of the books I had bought in North Korea in 2011. I posted them to my blog where they have been for the past seven and a half years. Not long after my trip the library acquired a scanner and I realized that scanned images looked a heck of a lot better than my digital pictures where I always seemed to be dodging my own shadow (or my reflection when snapping glossy covers). It wasn’t until now that I thought of redoing my Going shopping in the DPRK post with clearer images of the book covers.

Which got me thinking…why not continue this post whereby I show all the books–pocket-size, at least–that I had bought in North Korea? There were a lot of them, for sure. I have read and reviewed many of them already, and they can be found on my blogs with sharp scanned cover images so I will not duplicate them here. I will only show the books that I have not heretofore blogged about or read.

Let’s start with the glorious rainbow assortment of socialist tracts by the Great Leader Marshal Kim Il Sung and the Dear Leader Comrade General Kim Jong Il. Befitting the precious reputation of their beloved authors, the titles and author names were often printed in gold (which unfortunately doesn’t always scan well):

The Character and the Actor, the light blue title by Kim Jong Il, was a hardcover at only 38 pages.