Look Here: Five paperback covers with art by Bruce Pennington

31 March 201410 August 2016 RCLeave a comment

More scans of books selected from the piles that continually rise and fall and fall and rise again around me here in our tiny home office; the artist this time around is Bruce Pennington:

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**ABOVE:** Laurence James, *Starcross* (London: Sphere, 1974), with cover art by Bruce Pennington.

**ABOVE:** Clark Ashton Smith, *Lost Worlds: Volume 1* (Frogmore: Panther, 1974), with wraparound cover art by Bruce Pennington.

**ABOVE:** Mack Reynolds, *The Towers of Utopia* (NY: Bantam, 1975), with cover art by Bruce Pennington.

**ABOVE:** Ronald Holmes, ed., *Macabre Railway Stories* (London: Star, 1983), with cover art by Bruce Pennington.

**ABOVE:** Robert Silverberg, ed., *Alpha 5* (NY: Ballantine, 1974), with cover art by Bruce Pennington.

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

Look Here: One lovely SF cover with art by David Blossom

17 October 201310 August 2016 RC1 Comment

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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Robert Silverberg, Tower of Glass (NY: Bantam, 1971), with cover art by David Blossom.

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…

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

Look Here: Three SF covers with atmospheric art by Chris Foss

14 August 201310 August 2016 RCLeave a comment

Time for some more cover scans from the library of yours truly! This time around, I’ve got three SF paperbacks with art by British illustrator Chris Foss, whose airbrushed visions of massive starships, architecture, and hardware spawned a legion of imitators back in the 1970s (and beyond):

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

Look Here: Four more SF covers with art by Robert Foster

7 August 201310 August 2016 RCLeave a comment

Here are four novels with cover art by Robert Foster that I acquired this spring:

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Unfortunately, the edition of Davy that you see above is not the one I would prefer to own. The edition that I would prefer to own is the one that shows more of Robert Foster’s artwork and thus doesn’t drain all of the surrealism out of it:

You can view a snapshot of Foster’s painting, framed and hanging on somebody’s wall, over on the Illustration Exchange site, where you’ll find the following particulars: 19 x 25 inches, acrylic, 1964.

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

Look Here: Four more early 1970s SF covers with art by Charles Moll

21 June 201310 August 2016 RCLeave a comment

This morning, let us give thanks to the gods themselves for churches that organize used-book sales:

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**ABOVE:** Isaac Asimov, *The Gods Themselves* (New York: Fawcett, n.d.), with cover art by Charles Moll.

**ABOVE:** Poul Anderson, *Virgin Planet* (New York: Warner, 1973), with cover art by Charles Moll.

**ABOVE:** John Brunner, *The Whole Man* (New York: Ballantine, 1973), with cover art by Charles Moll.

**ABOVE:** Robert Silverberg, ed., *New Dimensions III* (Scarborough, ON: New American Library of Canada, 1974), with cover art by Charles Moll.

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

Look Here: Three more covers with art by Gene Szafran

4 June 201311 August 2016 RCLeave a comment

I often think that I should be more systematic in presenting my cover scans, but then again, because I’m always buying new stuff, I think it might be easier for you simply to remember to check out the various categories and tags at the bottom of each post if you see work that you like; there might just be more by the same artist on view in other posts:

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Szafran’s Downward to the Earth cover art (1971) clearly owes a lot to the “magic realist” airbrush paintings of the German artist Paul Wunderlich; the other two covers, however, owe nothing at all.

Look Here: More paperback covers by Paul Lehr

4 June 201011 August 2016 RCLeave a comment

Somebody out there likes Paul Lehr’s work; I know this not because people post to tell me they like it but because the Ragged Claws Network blog stats show regular visits to the Paul Lehr category. So, on with the show:

paul-lehr_easy-prey — **ABOVE:** Josephine Bell, *Easy Prey* (New York: Ballantine, 1959), with cover art by Paul Lehr.

paul-lehr_candle-in-the-sun — **ABOVE:** Robert Wells, *Candle in the Sun* (New York: Berkley, 1971), with cover art by Paul Lehr.

paul-lehr_three-trips-in-time-and-space — **ABOVE:** Larry Niven, John Brunner, and Jack Vance, *Three Trips in Time and Space* (New York: Dell, 1974), with cover art by Paul Lehr.

Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Book/Magazine Covers (Jones) · Illustration Art · Jeffrey "Jeff" Catherine Jones · Look Here · Samuel R. Delany

Look Here: Ten more paperback covers by Jeffrey Jones

5 February 201011 August 2016 RC4 Comments

The original reproduction on many of the following covers by Jeffrey Jones, all from the library of yours truly, was very poor, so my scans are sometimes not the best here. One exception is the last cover, Twilight of the Serpent, which actually showcases Jones’s artwork in more detail and with more lively colour than does the rather dour reproduction on the back cover of publisher Underwood-Miller’s lavish hardcover, The Art of Jeffrey Jones.

**ABOVE:** Robert Silverberg, ed., *Earthmen & Strangers* (New York: Dell, 1968), with cover by Jeffrey Jones.

**ABOVE:** A. E. Van Vogt, *The Book of Ptath* (New York: Paperback Library, 1968), with cover by Jeffrey Jones.

**ABOVE:** Samuel R. Delany, *The Jewels of Aptor* (New York: Ace, 1968), with cover by Jeffrey Jones.

**ABOVE:** L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, *The Incomplete Enchanter* (New York: Pyramid, 1968), with cover by Jeffrey Jones.

**ABOVE:** Peter Saxon, *The Curse of Rathlaw* (New York: Prestige Books, 1968), with cover by Jeffrey Jones.

**ABOVE:** Richard Meade, *The Sword of Morning Star* (New York: Signet, 1969), with cover by Jeffrey Jones.

**ABOVE:** Frank Brunner, *Bedlam Planet* (New York: Ace, n.d.), with cover by Jeffrey Jones.

**ABOVE:** Peter Valentine Timlett, *Twilight of the Serpent* (New York: Bantam Books, 1977), with cover by Jeffrey Jones.

My favourites this time around are the covers for The Curse of Rathlaw (1968), an early effort in which Jones’s attractive design for the vignette is nicely reinforced by the typography, and Twilight of the Serpent (1977), a later cover which displays Jones’s hard-won skills as a draftsman (or draughtsman, if you prefer), mastery of lost-and-found edges in oil painting, and increasing willingness in the 1970s and early 1980s to produce images that went against the grain of traditional heroic fantasy.

Alfred Bester · Book/Magazine Covers (All) · Illustration Art · Look Here · Paul Lehr · Philip K. Dick

Look Here: Nine Paperback Covers by Paul Lehr

7 April 200911 August 2016 RC2 Comments

From the bookshelves of yours truly, here are nine paperback covers (ten, actually; a bonus image was added at a later date) by Paul Lehr, along with one Lehr-ish cover by another hand: