"This day's experience, set in order, none of it left ragged or lying about, all of it gathered in like treasure and finished with, set aside." –Alice Munro, "What is Remembered"
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Isn’t it interesting that the art director at Ace put the blurb on The Falling Astronauts cover directly over Meltzer’s signature. No art credit inside the book, either. But Meltzer was probably paid a lot for his work, right? Yeah, right…
How many times has a painting by Francis Bacon appeared on the cover of a book that is not about the life and/or art of Francis Bacon? I’m no expert, but I can only think of one instance — you are welcome to post a comment if you know of more! — and here it is, scanned from my personal library, along with a small, low-quality JPEG of Bacon’s original painting, Man in Blue V:
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Now, although Bacon’s painting itself is simply composed and nearly monochromatic in colour, the contrasty, cropped, colour-reduced version on display on the cover of Darkness at Noon reads to me as little more than a shadow of The Man.
Francis Bacon was born 28 October 1909 and died on this day, 28 April, back in 1992. In other words, today is the twenty-first anniversary of the death of Francis Bacon.
BONUS IMAGE:
A reader delurked today to bring to my attention another book cover with art by Bacon: Hadrianus VII by Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo), with the Fr. being short for “Frederick”. Here’s what it looks like:
The tiny image posted above — the only one I could find on short notice — is from the catalogue of an online bookseller.
Thanks, Arthur!
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Well, folks, I’m almost to the end of my collection of paperbacks with cover art by Jeffrey Jones. Of course, I’m always on the lookout for books that I don’t have, but since I can’t afford to pay what many online booksellers want for old paperbacks, I generally have to hope that I will stumble upon what I want for cheap at a thrift store, rummage sale, small-town bookstore, or what have you…
Wish me luck!
A few months ago, I picked up a couple of “bales” of National Lampoon Magazine — thirty-two issues, in all — from a local bookseller for cheap. It was only when I got home with my bales and cut the strings that I found out that all but one of the issues were from the 1980s and 1990s, which was okay because, at the very least, it gave me quite a few terrific comic strips by M. K. Brown, R. Crumb, Shary Flenniken, Rick Geary, Buddy Hickerson, Mark Marek, Rodrigues, Gahan Wilson, et al., to read. The lone exception, however, was an issue from November 1975, which — o lucky me! — includes the second-last Idyl strip by Jeffrey Jones that ever appeared in the magazine.
Now, if all you’ve seen are reprints of Idyl, you might be interested to know that the strip first appeared in a newsprint section of the Lampoon called “Funny Pages” and that, in the November 1975 issue, all of the strips in the “Funny Pages,” including Idyl, were overprinted in light blue with only the word balloons left uncoloured. To give you an idea of the sombre, twilight mood that the blue colour lends to Jones’s strip — which begins with the words, “It’ll be dark soon” — I present to you the following scan:
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The effect is so appropriate to the theme of the strip that one can’t help but wonder if the art director didn’t choose the colour specifically to complement Jones’s work…
“Idyl was intended as satire and whimsy. One art director and one editor, who met me each month with puzzled faces, continued to remind me that National Lampoon was a humor magazine, ‘As long as YOU laugh,’ they finally said. So each month I would go in laughing. I also must admit that I love to draw nude women.”
— Jeffrey Jones, interview, 2001
RELATED LINKS:
More cover scans of books in my personal library:
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ABOVE: David Gerrold, When Harlie Was One (New York: Ballantine, 1972), with cover art by Jacques Wyrs.
Surprise, surprise, surprise… it’s another post featuring paperback covers scanned by me from my very own collection of disintegrating SF:
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More covers from the collection of yours truly:
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I’ve seen a few fantasy and SF paperbacks with covers by James Steranko on the shelves at local bookstores and thrift shops over the years, but I’ve rarely bothered to buy any. Here’s a scan of one that I did buy:
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I also found a copy of Steranko’s 1976 “visual novel” Chandler priced at $3.99 at the local Value Village, so I bought that, too, and scanned the cover for display:
Enjoy!
More crumbling paperbacks from the collection of yours truly, this time with cover art by an illustrator I know nothing about except that he definitely produced one of the following covers, the one that is uncredited but signed, and probably produced the other one, which is uncredited and unsigned — the signature has likely been cropped out — but which stylistic and contextual evidence suggests is also by him:
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Ragged Claws Network 