"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 fantasy painting by Daina Graziunas displayed below accompanied the story “Hope’s End” by Marv Wolfman, published in Epic Illustrated vol. 1, no. 2 (June 1980), pp. 22-23. I have removed some text and the magazine gutter from the image so we can all better appreciate Daina’s art. Apologies to Daina, however, if I’ve somehow messed it up.
Here’s a cover scan of a paperback picked at random from the piles in the room that serves as my study/studio. The artist here is Steele Savage, known to longtime readers here at RCN for his illustrations for Catharine F. Sellew’s Adventures with the Giants:
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ABOVE: Robert A. Heinlein, Red Planet (NY: Ace, 1971), with cover art by Steele Savage.
The Ace paperback edition of Heinlein’s Red Planet, 71140, does not include a publication date, but according to ISFDB, the book was published in 1971. Now, according to Wikipedia, Steele Savage was born in 1898 and died in 1970. So on the face of it, it would seem that that Heinlein cover was among the last illustration assignments that Savage ever worked on. Nice, clean, precise work for a 70-something year old artist!
And a nice touch that the design of the “outdoor costumes” of the colonists in Savage’s illustration is more or less faithful to Clifford Geary’s cover and illustrations for the 1949 first-edition hardcover of Red Planet. Here, for the sake of comparison, is a scan of the front cover of my copy, which I rescued from a library discard sale a number of years ago:
ABOVE: Robert A. Heinlein, Red Planet (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons), with cover art by Clifford Geary.
Red Planet was one of the first two science-fiction novels I ever read (the other was Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo, which I didn’t like anywhere near as much), and I read it in the exact hardcover edition that you see above. But it’s not that I am so ancient. It’s that our rural school library at the time — a tiny room lined with shelves with a table in the middle, and no librarian — was very badly out of date. As I recall, it was shortly after I read those two Heinlein novels that our school miraculously received boxes of new paperbacks in a variety of genres that were shelved at the back of the various classrooms. That was a big deal!
A couple of weeks of silence, and now here I am, back in the control room of RCN’s online headquarters, poised to post a gallery of one paperback cover, scanned by me mere minutes ago from my personal copy of Thomas Pynchon’s V. Earlier today, I searched high and low online for information about the Bantam Modern Classic edition V. in an attempt to determine if anyone out there knows who produced the uncredited, unsigned cover art, with no luck, none, nothing, zilch, but whatever… I’m going to post it anyway… and then perhaps I’ll offer a copy of the scan to ThomasPynchon.com, where the Bantam Modern Classic edition of the book is NOT currently listed:
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ABOVE: Thomas Pynchon, V. (NY: Bantam, 1968), with cover art by the great unknown.
If anyone out there knows for sure who the artist is here — by itself, the generic 60s illustration style points in any number of directions! — please feel free to post the information in the comments below.
P.S. The hot spot to the left of the figure is not glare from the glossy cover stock; rather, it’s a feature of the illustration.