

"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"
Picked this book up recently in an attempt to reduce the SF credit that I have at a local used bookstore because I took in box of SF paperbacks in an attempt to thin the herd but was unable to get cash for them. It’s a vicious circle, folks! Probably better to give the books to local charity sales, which is what I usually do.
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.
From Creepy Magazine #125 (Feb 1981), here’s “Knight Errant” by author Roy Kinnard and illustrator Mike Saenz.
The story here is pretty clearly a riff on Richard Corben’s underground classic, “How Howie Made It in the Real World.” IMHO, of course.
After a longish silence, here you have it, folks… yet another cover scan of an old paperback from my personal collection:
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More cover scans today, all of paperbacks in my personal library:
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Old news, I know… but anyway… it’s the style that’s important here:
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An homage done the right way by Sienkiewicz!
(If you know of a closer match, please feel free to post a link in the comments. I don’t have time to search… )
From my personal collection of 20th Century SF:
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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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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:
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!