Adventures in Art – Virgil Finlay’s Color Covers
Virgil Finlay (1914 – 1971) was one of the dominant speculative fiction magazine artists of his day; he started doing illustrations for Weird …
Blog Archives
Adventures in Art: Paul Lehr
Paul Lehr (1930-98) studied at the prestigious Pratt Institute under Stanley Meltzoff, and while he did a number of great covers between …
Adventures in Art – Robert Maguire
Robert A. Maguire (August 3, 1921 – February 26, 2005) was a 20th-century American fine illustrator, known primarily for his noir …
Adventures in Art – SF Holiday Covers
A running theme for Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine was for Ed Emsh to paint a thematic holiday cover for the December issue. The only two years this tradition was skipped were 1952 and 1955. Given the time of year, it seemed properly thematic to showcase all eight, plus a a few other related covers for Astounding and F&SF.
Adventures in Art – Late-’60s Avon Horror
To be honest, I’m not a big horror fiction reader, in part because I’m not sure where to start. Though I do get a kick out of horror novel covers. Like these very ambient covers for Avon in the late 1960s; very evocative, definitely horror, nice colors, and an interesting running theme (same angle, same color pattern).
Adventures in Art – Ed Emsh covers (1)
I really dig Ed Emsh’s style; at his best, his book and magazine covers are vibrant and dynamic. I’ll let these high(er)-res covers speak for themselves: an assortment from books (mostly Ace and Pyramid paperbacks), pulps, and digest magazines, from the early 1950s to late-1960s. I put them in rough chronological order.
Adventures in Art: Modern Bond Covers
This has been picked up by numerous other blogs by now, but the rights to the James Bond novels are changing hands, going from their venerable owner Penguin Books to the more-hip genre publisher Vintage. Two preview covers have been released for the new editions; they remind me more of old ’40s mystery novels—like the Dell Mapbacks—than James Bond novels, with their subtle, art-deco, low-impact covers.
Adventures in Art – Frank R. Paul (1) The Gernsback Years
Frank R. Paul, first major science fiction illustrator, who populated the early Hugo Gernsback magazines of the 1920s and 1930s with his imaginative designs. While he was pretty abysmal at drawing people, Paul was great at making technical-mechanical devices, was bright and garish enough to attract readers to the new genre, and perfectly portrays the Gernsback era of “scientifiction” in art.
