Classic Covers: More From Jack Vance
We’re celebrating the release of DCC Dying Earth all this Month with articles in honor of Jack Vance. With hundreds of titles in dozens of editions in as many different languages, a catalog of Jack Vance’s prolific output is a feast of diverse and changing visual styles over many years. With cover illustrations as varied as Frazetta-style sword-and-sorcery, heady new age semiotics, surreal horror, literal Tolkien fantasy,...
Classic Covers: Jack Vance
One of the benefits of being an extraordinarily productive and highly-reprinted genre writer during the mass market paperback publishing boom of the mid-twentieth century is you get a terrific amount of amazing visual art forever associated with your name. Jack Vance, author of over 60 books (whenever you see ‘over’ a certain number, that’s a pretty big clue that the author in question is so prolific that it’s...
Ballantine Adult Fantasy: William Morris
One of the most significant figures in the cultural life of Victorian England, William Morris (1834-1896) was everything from a poet, translator, and writer of medievalist fantasy, to a political activist, printer, champion of building preservation, and a renowned innovator in textile manufacturing and interior design. When Lin Carter oversaw the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line (1969-74), he brought many of Morris’ out-of-print...
Classic Covers: Ballantine Fantasy
The decade of fantasy publishing kicked off by the runaway success of the The Lord of the Rings produced not only a flurry of reprints of classic fantasy, but also an entire crop of creative, iconic, and visionary cover designs. Ballantine Books launched its iconic Ballantine Adult Fantasy line on the strength of the fantasy boom, featuring cover art as wonderous as the contents of the books themselves. We’ve gathered together...
Ballantine Adult Fantasy: The Lord of the Rings
Strictly speaking, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings isn’t actually part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, but it might be fair to say it’s the series’ very foundation. With a rather weird publishing history in the United States, Tolkien’s epic finally got an ‘authorized’ edition of three paperbacks from Ballantine in 1965, along with a reprint of The Hobbit. Already a hit, The Lord...
Classic Covers: J.R.R. Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was the book that launched a thousand trilogies, and made Tolkien’s name synonymous not just with modern fantasy fiction, but publishing mega-success. With more copies, in more languages, in more editions, than anything else in its category, and with an entire sub-industry spun out of publishing various notes, unpublished drafts, and side-excursions of its author, The Lord of the...
Classic Covers: Tanith Lee
Poetic and prolific UK author Tanith Lee (1947-2015) ranged from the sun-dappled lands of fantasy to the mist-shrouded shores of horror, and seemingly everywhere in between. Spooky, sensual, and superbly-crafted, Lee’s genre-stretching work featuring vampires, doomed heroes, cursed lovers, gothic manors, crossed identities, unholy seductions, shapeshifters, demon princes, possession, sorcery, and madness was fantasy as much in...
Classic Covers: Arkham House
When one thinks of legendary pulp publishers, names like Weird Tales, Black Mask, and Planet Stories leap to mind — beautiful magazines as sadly transitory as the era of popular literacy they defined. But it was for an indie book publisher to emerge as one of the leading lights of preservation for the best in the weird and fantastical horror of the age, and add its own legendary name to the rolls of honored pulpsters: Arkham...
Classic Covers: Andre Norton
Alice Mary Norton — best known to the world by her penname Andre Norton — was the author of over a dozen series in the genres of fantasy and science fiction, as well as a host of standalone works, including everything from young adult stories and historical adventures to wild science-fantasy mashups and sword-and-sorcery. Her best known and most enduring work is Witch World, itself consisting of story cycles running the...
Classic Covers: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
From the magazine covers of Fantastic, to endlessly reprinted mass market paperback collections, and comics and role playing game supplements by the score, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser have long proven an irresistible subject for artists and illustrators. The giant, tawny-haired barbarian and his nimble-limbed roguish companion make for a striking contrast not only narratively, but visually as well. Of course, there are more than a few...
Classic Covers: The Savage Sword of Conan
How do you skirt a restrictive comics code and make visual Conan stories with the requisite blood-pumping grittiness that is integral to Howard’s adventures? You make a magazine of course! Already popular in his initial comic book incarnation of Conan the Barbarian, Marvel introduced the more adult-oriented The Savage Sword of Conan in 1974, quickly achieving a wide circulation and, thanks to writer and editor Roy Thomas’...
Classic Covers: Poul Anderson
With scores of novels spanning the popular genres of science fiction and fantasy, with hundreds of magazine and anthology appearances, and with a career spanning the most creative era of visual marketing in publishing of the 20th century, Poul Anderson’s bibliography has the quintessential ‘Classic Covers’ ingredients. Here is but a small sample of the art that brought Anderson’s stories to...
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