Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Illustration Art · Look Here · Richard Powers

Look Here: Two SF covers with scintillating and stimulating art by Richard Powers

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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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Keywords: Out of the Deeps by John Wyndham, Mortals and Monsters by Lester del Rey, Richard Powers.

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Gene Szafran · Illustration Art · Look Here

Look Here: Two Heinleins with cover art by Gene Szafran

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A couple of really ratty old SF paperbacks, from the collection of yours truly:

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To view three Heinlein paperbacks with cover art by Szafran that are from the same reprint series as the above titles but are are in very good condition, click here and scroll down. To view all of the covers with art by Szafran that I’ve posted so far, start here.

Keywords: Assignment in Eternity, The Menace from Earth, Robert A. Heinlein, Gene Szafran.

Holiday Greetings · Photos

Happy Halloween 2013 from RCN!

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“It was traditionally believed that the souls of the departed wandered the earth until All Saints’ Day, and All Hallows’ Eve provided one last chance for the dead to gain vengeance on their enemies before moving to the next world. In order to avoid being recognised by any soul that might be seeking such vengeance, people would don masks or costumes to disguise their identities.”
— Prince Sorie Conteh, Traditionalists, Muslims, and Christians in Africa: Interreligious Encounters and Dialogue (Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2009), retrieved 30 October 2013

Arnold Lobel · Illustration Art · Look Here

Look Here: “The Headless Horseman” by Arnold Lobel

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Both in the context of Prelutsky and Lobel’s children’s book, The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight, and in this series of posts here at RCN, Lobel’s best scary art has been saved for last:

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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.

Look Here · Photos

Look Here: “Scene of Death […]”

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All four of the images posted below come from the website of the Historic Houses Trust (HHT) of New South Wales (NSW), which hosts an amazing digital public archive that includes forensic photography collected and created by the NSW Police between 1912 and 1964:

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What intrigues me about the above photographs is how the phrase “Scene of Death” in the “title” of each one opens a valve of imagination in the viewer that the still image — last photo excepted — would probably not so easily twist open sans text… or maybe it’s just me…

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Illustration Art · Look Here

Look Here: A bloody history with blood-soaked art by Victor Kalin

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Back in August, I bought a small stack of gothic paperbacks with covers that depict women fleeing from castles, houses, men, etc., that I thought I might scan and post in the run up to Halloween this year, but now it looks like that is not going to happen.

(What can I say? I simply lost interest.)

A few minutes ago, however, I did manage to scan the cover of Daniel P. Mannix’s The History of Torture (London: New English Library, 1970), with art by Victor Kalin:

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Kalin’s work was not produced specifically for Mannix’s book but rather was repurposed from an earlier publication, Peter Saxon’s The Torturer (NY: Paperback Library, 1967). Although both covers are dominated by Kalin’s painting, the NEL version stands out as the better of the two due to the designer’s selection of a title font that echoes the gothic details of the artwork.