"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"
The lesson here is: don’t swipe holus-bolus from a masterwork of illustration art unless you’re certain you have the chops to transform what you’ve swiped into a new image that doesn’t make viewers shake their heads in dismay not only at your lack of originality but also at your shaky grasp of the basic skills of a professional artist:
A nice variety of covers by Lehr this time around. I especially dig Lehr’s 1967 cover for Margaret St. Clair’s The Dolphins of Altair, even if the exact location of the dorsal fin on the central dolphin (who, to Lehr’s credit, really looks like he is carrying a weight on his back) is slightly mysterious. I don’t know about you, but I’m happy to chalk this one up to artistic license… the fin is entirely hidden by the woman’s body and that’s all there is to it…
Click here to view all of the covers with art by Paul Lehr that I’ve posted so far.
Here’s some more early work by Jeffrey Jones, scanned from my personal library, and I have a strong suspicion, dear reader, that at least one of these covers will be new to you:
These are the only two “Ace Science Fiction Classic” paperbacks with cover art by Roy Krenkel that I own, so enjoy!
Frazetta’s Krenkel-influenced Edgar Rice Burroughs covers will be familiar to many, but his Maza of the Moon cover is somewhat less well known, mainly because the book’s author, Otis Adelbert Kline, never achieved any lasting popularity:
If Otis Adelbert Kline is known for anything, it is not the quality of his writing but the way he promoted his highly derivative adventure stories by surreptitiously circulating a rumour, reported in the fan press but later debunked, of a feud between himself and the pulp-fiction juggernaut he most closely styled himself after, Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Next up: more Jones covers!
More scans from the library of you-know-who:
To view all of the scans of covers by Leo and Diane Dillon that I’ve posted so far, click here.
This past weekend, I finally located (and purchased) a copy of Gordon R. Dickson’s Wolfling, with cover by Jeffrey Jones, so now, at last, I can post this comparison of two very similar images by Jones executed in two different mediums, oil vs. ink:
The “Conan” frontispiece was published in Savage Sword of Conan in 1975, but the style and the signature suggest to me that it was created around the time of the 1969 Wolfling cover. Anyone know if the “Conan” frontispiece was published anywhere else prior to its appearance in Savage Sword?
I don’t have a lot of paperbacks with cover art by Frank Frazetta, but here are a few I do have…
Rogue Roman is an early cover painting by Frazetta that someone out there might enjoy seeing in its original format. The painting sans text appears in the Frazetta art book, Icon (Grass Valley, CA: Underwood Books, 1998), page 126. Looks a lot different there, too: the overall tone is much, much warmer. But I can’t decide if Rogue Roman is one of those pieces that was altered at a later date by Frazetta or not. And since there’s no mention of alterations in the discussion that accompanies the painting in Icon, it might just be a case of inaccurate reproduction on the paperback. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Of course, most Frazetta fans know that what makes the artist’s Moon Maid cover more than just a visually arresting illustration is that the original painting was substantially altered (though not, IMHO, improved) by Frazetta when he got it back from the publisher; which is to say, the painting as you see it here no longer exists.
The male model for The Mucker could easily have been Frazetta himself.
And finally, the central figure in Frazetta’s Tanar of Pellucidar was clearly swiped by Arthur Suydam for the painting that appears on the cover of his The Art of the Barbarian (Special Edition): Conan, Tarzan, Death Dealer. Look it up and you’ll see!
One bare foot… hm… perhaps it’s a sign… a symbol of some sort… if only I could think what it means…
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BONUS COVER SCAN (added 14 August 2010):
This evening, as I was absent-mindedly browsing the paperback shelves in our basement, I came across a cover by an uncredited artist that had something about it that made me want to include it here…
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BONUS LINK:
Flickr > Kyle Katz > Robert Foster Covers
In my growing collection of vintage books, I have quite a few paperbacks with Robert McGinnis art. I posted a few last time; now, here are five more, in no particular order:
I usually prefer to display paperback covers in order of publication, but these Fawcett paperbacks mostly don’t include the year(s) of publication, only the year the book was copyright.
Ragged Claws Network 