Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 20:27:09 -0400
From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us>
To: WSFA Official List <wsfa-forum at yahoogroups.com>,
 WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>,
 bsfsgeneral <bsfsgeneral at bsfs.org>
Subject: [WSFA] The Decline and Fall of the Book Cover
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Excerpt:
I was a nerdy sci-fi-reading kid in the seventies. The so-called golden
age of book and magazine illustration had died out some decades earlier,
with the advent of color photography and improved print reproduction, but=

superb illustration was still thriving in the marginal niches of pulp and=

genre covers. Richard Powers, who illustrated the cover of what seemed
like every science fiction paperback published in the nineteen-sixties,
was influenced by surrealists like Roberto Matta and Yves Tanguy, and
painted landscapes where monumental amorphous forms stood like alien
architecture or colossal carcasses on indistinct plains. Ian Miller's
covers for Bantam's editions of Ray Bradbury looked as though they were
drawn by a lunatic imprisoned with only a straight edge and a
compass=C3=A2=C2=80=C2=94mechanical fantasias of girders and circuitry en=
closing grotesque,
half-molten faces. This was also a time when the aesthetics of psychedeli=
a
were filtering down into children's pop culture, so that my editions of C=
=2E
S. Lewis's Christian allegories and John Christopher's juvenile science
fiction looked as if they were painted by Peter Max, every object
seemingly sculpted out of foam. The blowing of minds was an artistic
priority.
--- end excerpt ---

<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/07/the-decline-and-fall=
-of-the-book-cover.html>

        mark