Among the most reprinted authors in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line was Lord Dunsany, the Anglo-Irish peer who was also a tremendously prolific short story writer and playwright. Dunsany’s sweeping elegies of imagined worlds were both reminiscent of classical myth and the dreaming aesthetic of the visionary fantasists and tellers of Weird Tales going back to Poe. Dunsany is cited as an influence by almost every major writer of the fantastic to emerge over the course of the twentieth century.
From the iconically stylized Bob Pepper covers for The King of Elfland’s Daughter and Don Rodriguez, Ray Cruz’s baroque bestiary of At the Edge of the World, and the surreal fabulist landscapes of Gervasia Gallardo’s work for The Charwoman’s Shadow, Beyond the Fields We Know, and Over the Hills and Far Away, all of the BAF covers for Lord Dunsany’s collections evoke scenes of storybook wonder and wild imagery perfectly suited for Dunsany’s secondary worlds of the imagination.
