I’ve posted scans of two of the following covers before, so in order to add value, I’ve rescanned one of the repeats and scanned the other from a duplicate copy that I have in my collection:
[CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]
ABOVE: Sax Rohmer, Brood of the Witch-Queen (NY: Pyramid Books, 1966), with cover art by J. Lombardero.
ABOVE: Sax Rohmer, The Golden Scorpion (NY: Pyramid Books, 1966), with cover art by J. Lombardero.
ABOVE: Sax Rohmer, The Dream Detective (NY: Pyramid Books, 1966), with cover art by J. Lombardero.
ABOVE: Sax Rohmer, The Yellow Claw (NY: Pyramid Books, 1966), with cover art by J. Lombardero.
ABOVE: Sax Rohmer, The Green Eyes of Bast (NY: Pyramid Books, 1971), with cover art by J. Lombardero.
I’m certainly no expert on the publication history of the novels of Sax Rohmer, but it seems unlikely to me that they have ever been as attractively and appropriately packaged as they were when Pyramid was the publisher and Joe Lombardero was the cover artist. Sad to say, but sans Lombardero, Pyramid embraced a far more pedestrian design for their Sax Rohmer books (not that the actual readers of the books probably cared one way or the other). Here, for instance, is Pyramid’s edition of Emperor Fu Manchu, with art by Len Goldberg, that was published in the same year, 1966, as four of the five paperbacks posted above with art by Lombardero:
ABOVE: Sax Rohmer, Emperor Fu Manchu (NY: Pyramid Books, 1966), with cover art by Len Goldberg.
Oddly enough, around the same time, Sax Rohmer and Pyramid Books got a bit of “free” publicity from International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, New York:
ABOVE: Advertisement for International Telephone and Telegraph, New York, published in National Geographic, vol. 132, no. 5 (November 1967).
Unfortunately, librarians have often used exactly the same argument that the folks at ITT deploy in that advertisement to defend Corpsman C. Sanders’ preference for Fu Manchu over Hamlet to defend the inclusion of comics in library collections…
But anyway, no publicity is bad publicity, right?
This is a marvellous site and there is some truly wonderful stuff here (eg Nicole Claveloux), but no Frank Hampson? No Dan Dare? Seriously?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Hampson
LikeLike
Thanks for the lovely compliment, marten, and the helpful link, but I do know who Frank Hampson is, and if I had something — anything! — with art by Frank Hampson in the house that I could scan and post, I’d scan and post it. But I’ve got nothing. No Frank Hampson. No Dan Dare. Seriously.
LikeLike