"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"
In my paperback collection, I have at the moment at least half a dozen of the novels in Fritz Leiber’s “Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser” series with cover art by Jeffrey Jones; here are two of them, freshly scanned and processed for your viewing enjoyment:
More later!
From the library of yours truly, as usual:
BTW, there’s a certain “Dillon Fangirl” out there who seems to think that she has a right to take EVERY Dillon scan from RCN (and LOTS of other sites, too) and post them ALL on her Dillon fan blog without properly acknowledging her sources, i.e., without posting links to the pages where she “found” the images. Now, as someone who goes to a lot of trouble to find and purchase old paperbacks and scan them for display on the Web, I think that what she has done (and continues to do) is extremely uncool. And the fact is, I’ve told her as much by email. I’ve also told her that she is NOT welcome here at RCN. Won’t do any good, of course. She is ungrateful. And utterly shameless.
More Jones covers, scanned by me from my own collection:
To view all of the Zebra/Kensington paperbacks with cover art by Jeffrey Jones that I’ve posted over the years, click here.
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I have quite a few Agatha Christie novels with cover art by Tom Adams, and sooner or later, I will scan them all for display here at RCN. So stay tuned, mystery lovers — and Tom Adams fans!
I scoured the shelves at the local thrift shops a few days ago, looking for some cheap horror paperbacks to scan and post in the days leading up to Halloween, but the only one I saw that featured an illustration that I sort of liked was the following uncredited cover for The Devil’s Children, edited by Michael Parry:
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I suppose it’s possible that the cover image is an early illustration by Alan Lee, though the rendering (in watercolour) is tighter, and displays a much wider range of values, than one usually encounters in Lee’s work. So, probably not by Lee. Unless it is.
From the library of yours truly:
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The foreground figures in the above (uncredited and unsigned) illustration are tremendously effective; the background figures, not so much.
From the paperback collection of yours truly, here are three covers with art by Stephen Miller, produced for a simultaneous six-volume reprint series of works by the great SF author, William Tenn, published by Ballantine Science Fiction back in 1968:
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The other three books in the series have covers by Stephen Miller that are as good as — and in at least one instance, perhaps two, significantly better than — the covers I’ve posted above. Unfortunately, I don’t own those ones, but you can easily find scans of them on flickr if you’re interested.
Think furry fetishism is a twenty-first century innovation in sex? Think again…
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As is usually the case with the fantasy and SF paperback covers that I post, I myself created the above image from my very own copy of James Broom Lynne’s novel.
And lest you think I am nearing the end of my supply of paperbacks with covers by Jeffrey Jones, let me assure you that I have enough for several more posts, at least.
Yeah, I know… there’s probably no direct connection between Ted CoConis’s stunning illustration for the cover of Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada and H. Rogers’ more workmanlike effort for Ernest Tidyman’s Shaft among the Jews — some design ideas are just “in the air” at certain points in history — but it is amusing to me that the cover of Nabokov’s daring and erudite literary novel, a novel which a reviewer for the New York Times described as “a love story, an erotic masterpiece, a philosophical investigation into the nature of time,” is several orders of magnitude sexier than the cover of a pulp fiction featuring “the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks.” Thus, this post:
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Ted CoConis has a JPEG of his Ada cover illustration, sans text, on display on his website. Look there!
BONUS SCAN:
The photographic cover of the movie tie-in edition of Shaft is evocative, I guess. And since I own it, I might as well scan and post it, right?
Ragged Claws Network 