"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"
Easy choice this morning. I scanned these a couple of days ago, so just a few strokes of the keyboard, a couple clicks of the mouse, and voilà:
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If you like what you see above, you should take a moment to check out the Tom Adams category here at RCN. I’ve posted quite a few covers with art by Tom Adams so far, and stay tuned, because I have more in my collection that I plan to scan and post in the near future.
From Heavy Metal vol. II, no. 11 (March 1979), here’s a gorgeous fantasy illustration, printed across two pages, that is identified in the table of contents by one word and a page number: “Nino, 48.”
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What to do, what to do… hmm… okay… I think it’s time for some more Agatha Christie covers with art by Tom Adams:
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To view all of the Agatha Christie covers with art by Tom Adams that I’ve scanned and posted here at RCN, start here.
Today, legendary graphic designer and illustrator Milton Glaser (b. 26 June 1929, New York City) celebrates his 84th birthday, so I dived into my stacks of old paperbacks, and this is what I came up with:
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“There is no security in the world, or in life. I don’t mind living with some ambiguity and realizing that eventually, everything changes.”
— Milton Glaser, in conversation with Debbie Millman,
How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer (2007)
“The story of how I decided to become an artist is this: When I was a very little boy, a cousin of mine came to my house with a paper bag. He asked me if I wanted to see a bird. I thought he had a bird in the bag. He stuck his hand in the bag, and I realized that he had drawn a bird on the side of a bag with a pencil. I was astonished! I perceived this as being miraculous. At that moment, I decided that was what I was going to do with my life. Create miracles.”
— Milton Glaser, in conversation with Debbie Millman,
How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer (2007)
Paul Alexander (American b. 1937) is not an illustrator whose name carries any weight with me, but I recently noticed that I have several novels with cover art by “Alexander” in my collection, and following a bit of close inspection, I began to realize why, beginning in the early 1970s, SF publishers like Ace, Baen, Ballantine, Del Rey, and Fawcett, lined up to publish his work. Alexander is a dab hand at painting spaceships and machinery in the vein of John Berkey, he handles human figures and creatures just fine, thank you very much, and he obviously knows a thing or two about brushwork, composition, colour theory, and so on.
In rummaging about for a bit information about Alexander’s career, I also recently noticed that, in his 1978 book Tomorrow and Beyond: Masterpieces of Science Fiction Art, the famous art director Ian Summers selected twelve (!) paintings by Alexander for display, but only six by Paul Lehr, six by John Berkey, and six by the great Richard Powers; second in terms of numbers was Steve Hickman with nine paintings, and third was Don Maitz with eight. Alexander, Hickman, and Maitz: solid craftsmen all, but not exactly the Holy Trinity of SF artists.
But enough grousing from me! Here are today’s cover scans:
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As computers increasingly became an essential tool in commercial illustration, Paul Alexander made a decision in the late 1990s to wind down his career in commercial art. According to an anonymous online source, Alexander now lives in Greenville, Ohio, and does not own a computer. The remaining inventory of his cover art is currently on display, and for sale, at Worlds of Wonder. Prices range between a thousand and two-thousand dollars. Alexander’s original gouache painting for the cover of Ian Watson’s The Very Slow Time Machine, for instance, is exactly two thousand; the painting for Frank Herbert’s The Godmakers is only twelve hundred; and the one for Robert Silverberg’s To Live Again has been reduced from seventeen fifty to fifteen fifty. And you know, despite my reservations about Paul Alexander’s work, if I had an unlimited budget for art, I just might buy that last one. It’s a very strong image.
BONUS SCAN:
And one with art by Alex Ebel:
Courtesy of our new 11 x 17 inch scanner/printer, my personal library, and GIMP, here are four covers that share a sort of thematic family resemblance along with a bonus cover on a slightly different theme; the artist credits, where known, are in the file names, as usual:
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The cover art for Notions: Unlimited by Robert Sheckley is uncredited, and no signature is visible, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the artist turned out to be Dean Ellis.
BONUS SCAN:
This morning, let us give thanks to the gods themselves for churches that organize used-book sales:
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ABOVE: Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves (New York: Fawcett, n.d.), with cover art by Charles Moll.
ABOVE: Poul Anderson, Virgin Planet (New York: Warner, 1973), with cover art by Charles Moll.
ABOVE: John Brunner, The Whole Man (New York: Ballantine, 1973), with cover art by Charles Moll.
ABOVE: Robert Silverberg, ed., New Dimensions III (Scarborough, ON: New American Library of Canada, 1974), with cover art by Charles Moll.
When I posted “Look Here: Three paperback covers plus with art by Don Ivan Punchatz” back in mid-May, I included a small “bonus” JPEG, reposted from another site, that displays all three of Punchatz’s iconic covers for Avon Science Fiction paperback edition of Isaac Asimov’s classic “Foundation Trilogy.” I would have posted my own scans, except that, at the time, I was missing the first book in the trilogy. Earlier today, however, I found, and purchased, a slightly beat-up copy of the Avon edition of Foundation at a local bookstore that perfectly matches the slightly beat-up copies of Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation that I already have in my collection. So now, as is my wont, I’m here to share my good fortune with the rag-tag fugitive followers of Ragged Claws Network:
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Hang the Little Man is only the second mystery cover with art by Victor Kalin that I’ve scanned and posted here at RCN; the first was The Fatal Foursome.
In recent months, I’ve begun looking through volumes of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books at church and garage sales in the hope of finding some long-forgotten images worthy of online preservation and contemplation here at RCN, and today, I am delighted to report that I have finally uncovered a series of illustrations that I think stands head and shoulders above the usual good-but-not-great, able-but-uninspired Reader’s Digest fare. The illustrations I am referring to were created by Michael Leonard for The Queen’s Confession, a “condensation” of English novelist Victoria Holt’s first-person narrative of the rise and fall of Marie Antoinette, and the complete package, story and pictures together, was first printed in Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, Vol. III, 1968, Summer Selections. Here are my scans:
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Because Reader’s Digest Condensed Books were generally printed on highly absorbent, low-quality paper to keep the cover price within reach of the average middle-class consumer, the full-colour, painted illustrations reproduced therein always tend to look a little soft. And yet, I think the excellence of Michael Leonard’s work shines through the sub-optimal reproduction.
I’d love to see Leonard’s Marie Antoinette illustrations in person.
POSTSCRIPT:
I just did a bit of Google research, and it appears to me from this online (auto)biography that the Michael Leonard who produced the above illustrations for Reader’s Digest is the same Michael Leonard (b. 1933) who has long been known in fine-art circles as one of Britain’s leading photo-realist painters. You can view examples of Michael Leonard’s paintings and drawings online here and here.
Ragged Claws Network 