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SOURCE: Jack Prelutsky, The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight: More Poems to Trouble Your Sleep (NY: Greenwillow Books, 1980), illustrated by Arnold Lobel.
"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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SOURCE: Jack Prelutsky, The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight: More Poems to Trouble Your Sleep (NY: Greenwillow Books, 1980), illustrated by Arnold Lobel.
I’m not going to put forth any arguments here regarding a possible chain of influence from Wyeth to Fischl to Frazetta (because I don’t think there is one), the relative quality of the three paintings pictured below (because none of them is truly first rate), the relative merits of “fine art” versus “illustration art” (because I don’t care about the issue), etc. I just have a hankering to see these three paintings mashed together in one post:
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BONUS IMAGES:
The novel is from my collection, the title is No Blade of Grass, the author is John Christopher, the cover artist is Michael Presley, and the cover scan is right here:
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ABOVE: John Christopher, No Blade of Grass (New York: Avon, 1980), with cover art by Michael Presley.
Two more Moorcocks with art by Bob Haberfield this morning, as promised yesterday:
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ABOVE: Michael Moorcock, The Jewel in the Skull (Frogmore: Mayflower, 1973), with cover art by Bob Haberfield.
ABOVE: Michael Moorcock, The Mad God’s Amulet (Frogmore: Mayflower, 1974), with cover art by Bob Haberfield.
Not by Dean Ellis, and not by Paul Lehr, though vaguely reminiscent of both, the illustration on the cover of Robert Silverberg’s Tower of Glass is complemented rather than overwhelmed by a big block of bold, compressed, sans-serif type:
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The artist here is David Blossom, but who the heck is David Blossom? The following summary of the artist’s career appears on various sites round the Web; my source is New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA):
Though born in Chicago, Illinois, Blossom lived most of his life on the East Coast. Growing up in Rye, New York, he later moved with his family to Westport, Connecticut in 1963, where he lived until his death. Early in his career, he worked as an art director at Young & Rubicam, a communications company, where he specialized in advertising for the Ford Motor Company and Pan American Airways. His work in illustration included covers for romance novels and popular magazines such as Outdoor Life and Reader’s Digest. Blossom is also known for creating movie posters for such Clint Eastwood westerns as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars, and A Few Dollars More. In its annual awards for excellence to deserving artists, the Society of Illustrators awarded the Hamilton King award to Blossom for best illustration of the year in 1973.
I’ve done a bit of searching, and I can’t find any information about which Clint Eastwood movie posters, exactly, featured art by Blossom, but possibly/maybe it was the ones that looked like this:
Here’s an example of Blossom’s non-SF illustration work, copied from the NBMAA blog, for comparison:
ABOVE: David Blossom, Benedict Arnold (n.d.), acrylic polymer on board, 29 x 22 inches.
Oddly enough, a later, photo-based design for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is build around more or less the same typographical idea as the design for Silverberg’s Tower of Glass, with art by Blossom:
And thus the serpent eats its tail… sort of…
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ABOVE: Michael Moorcock, The Knight of the Swords (Frogmore: Mayflower, 1973), with cover art by Bob Haberfield.
ABOVE: Michael Moorcock, The Queen of the Swords (Frogmore: Mayflower, 1973), with cover art by Bob Haberfield.
ABOVE: Michael Moorcock, The King of the Swords (Frogmore: Mayflower, 1974), with cover art by Bob Haberfield.
I have a couple more Moorcocks with cover art by Haberfield in my collection. Will probably scan and post ’em soon, if not sooner.
Here are six more images clipped from the online archive of Die Muskete hosted by the Austrian National Library and processed for display here by yours truly; the artist this time around is Paul Grabwinkler (1880-1946):
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SOURCE: Jack Prelutsky, The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight: More Poems to Trouble Your Sleep (NY: Greenwillow Books, 1980), illustrated by Arnold Lobel.
This morning, I’ve decided to bring you further selections from the Austrian humour/men’s magazine, Die Muskete. The artist this time around is Alexander Rothaug (1870 – 1846), who studied painting at the Vienna Academy of Arts from 1885 to 1892, pursued further studies in Munich, where he produced illustrations for the German magazine, Fliegenden Blätter, and then moved back to Vienna, where he worked as a freelance artist from 1897, becoming a member of the Association of the Visual Artists Vienna in 1911; the paintings, which I have extracted from the online archive of Die Muskete hosted by the Austrian National Library and have processed for display here at RCN, are At the Source, Dreaming, and The Herdsman:
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Specific publication information for each image is included in the file name, as usual.
Another discarded library book, recycled here, by me, for your viewing pleasure, as Halloween approacheth…
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… with more to come, later.
SOURCE: Jack Prelutsky, The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight: More Poems to Trouble Your Sleep (NY: Greenwillow Books, 1980), illustrated by Arnold Lobel.