"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"
It’s been a while since I last scanned and posted some covers of paperbacks in my personal collection, so let’s give that a try:
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In addition to RCN, I’m currently running three tumblr blogs and a twitter feed, and there are days when I think that, perhaps, I have taken on too much…
Here at RCN, we are unaccountably proud of our unsung power to distract an uncommunicative coterie of unwashed hipsters from the unbounded corruption of the uncaring world with an unsteady stream of unprofessional scans of unsound books from the unkempt collection of RCN’s undistinguished doofus-in-chief, yours truly. Like these, for instance:
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ABOVE: John Crowley, The Deep (NY: Berkley, 1976), D3163, with cover art by Richard Powers.
ABOVE: Clifford D. Simak, The Goblin Reservation (NY: Berkley, 1969), S1671, with cover art by Richard Powers.
ABOVE: Zach Hughes, The Stork Factor (NY: Berkley, 1975), N2781, with cover art by Richard Powers.
Powers didn’t produce many covers with collage elements that are as obvious as the mechanical building blocks of his art for Lester del Rey’s Mortals and Monsters, but he makes it work, splendidly, as usual. The dotted line and black dot on the left-hand side give the collage a sardonic twist: all that complex machinery, and the result is what? a pop gun?
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ABOVE: Lester del Rey, Mortals and Monsters (NY: Ballantine, c. 1965), with cover art by Richard Powers.
ABOVE: John Wyndham, Out of the Deeps (NY: Ballantine, 1969), with cover art by Richard Powers.
Although I’ve already scanned and posted quite a few SF covers with art by the great Richard Powers, I’m not done yet. Look here:
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Nice, eh?
I can’t remember when I bought the sixth printing of the 1974 Berkley Medallion edition of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle for a long time — it was a long time ago — but I do remember being both happy to have the novel to read and unhappy with the cover. Specifically, I’ve always been irritated by the wide red banner that the folks at Berkley Books rudely slapped across the face of Richard Powers’ lovely cover art in order to have a spot to brag about their decision to re-print a much-admired novel and to inform/remind readers that Philip K. Dick’s book had won the Hugo Award for “the best S-F novel of the year” — in 1963! But I am irritated about that no longer, because today I found a copy of the novel with the same cover but without the red banner — Berkley Science Fiction, 1982, tenth printing — in lovely condition, and it only cost me ninety-nine cents and tax to add to my collection.
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Do you see now what was obscured by the red banner? Ironically, it is none other than a little silhouette of “the man” standing ramrod-straight in a void (or hole, or window, or empty eye socket) in Powers’ oddly sculptural, strangely forbidding “high castle.”
I purchased the following four paperbacks with cover art by the great Richard Powers late last year from an online seller, and this morning I finally roused myself to scan them for display on RCN:
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To view all of the covers with art by Richard Powers that I’ve scanned and posted thus far in the life of RCN, start here.
More covers scanned and processed by me from books in my personal collection:
I’ve posted a lot of covers with art by Richard Powers over the past few years. Take a look: sixteen posts and counting.
Freshly scanned, by me, from my personal collection:
Here are three more covers with art by Richard Powers, scanned (as usual) by me from paperbacks in my personal collection:
Freshly scanned, by me, from my very own library:
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To view all of the paperbacks with cover art by Richard Powers that I’ve posted over the years, start here and scroll through the pages.
Ragged Claws Network 