Covers Unbound

SF fans of a certain age have happy memories of Gollancz's ‘Yellow Jackets’, a plain cover house style consisting of black, red or magenta typeface on a yellow background. This was the brainchild of the firm's founder, Victor Gollancz (1893-1967), who established his own publishing house in 1927 specialising in left-wing writing. He hired Stanley Morison (1889-1967), the typographer who, among many other things, invented the Time Roman font to help him come up with a style of cover design. Gollancz disliked ‘prettified picture jackets’, and spent a day visiting all the railway station bookshops in London to decide which colour would stand-out most effectively against the other books displayed for sale. His choice was informed by a knowledge of European publishing: on the Continent une jaune or un giallo were the popular terms for cheap novels printed in yellow paper—some dyes are more expensive, and some less, but there are a number of cheap ways to print yellow. Together ...

H G Wells's first published novel, The Time Machine (1895), effectively invented the time-travel genre, and remains one of the most famous of all science fiction titles. Of course, when William Heinemann took the project on they had no idea it was going to prove as enduring, and their original cover, with a low-key line drawing (by Ben Hardy) of the ‘sphinx’ Wells's time traveller encounters in the year 802,701 could hardly be more low-key. Since then it has been reprinted in hundreds of different formats, and a wide range of designers and artists have faced the task of covering the story. Here's a Brazilian edition from c. 1930; artist unknown: This illustrates the very beginning of the first chapter, where the time traveller is explaining his invention to his friends. Given the exotic wonders the later sections of the tale contain, it's puzzling that the publishers would go for something so mundane. The success of the 1960 movie adaptation, directed by G...

Frank Kelly Freas (1922-2005), known as ‘Dean of Science Fiction Artists’, is one of the most celebrated of all genre cover artists. A fifty year career, and hundreds of magazine and book covers, produced many memorable visions, but it is ‘Please... fix it, Daddy?’, the image of a plaintive-looking robot holding in its gigantic hand the broken body of a dead soldier, by which Freas is best known. It was originally the cover for the October 1953 issue of John Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction , illustrating Tom Godwin's first published story ‘The Gulf Between’. Godwin is probably more famous now for ‘The Cold Equations’, in which a spaceship pilot has no choice but to sacrifice the life of a stowaway if he is to have enough fuel to complete his mission, however much he would prefer not to. ‘The Gulf Between’, frankly not so good a story as ‘The Cold Equations’, concerns two rival military officers, Knight and Cullin, who disagree over the nature of the ideal soldier. C...

John Wyndham's 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids manages the impressive task of making vegetables scary. It requires a degree of contrivance, but Wyndham pulls it off. First he posits bioengineered carnivorous plants that can walk about on three stumpy legs and sting their prey with whip-like tentacles. Then he adds-in a second disaster: a spectacular meteor shower, which may actually be an orbiting weapons platform, that blinds all who watch it, leaving whole populations helpless before the perambulating plants. The result is one of the masterpieces of British ‘cosy catastophe’ science fiction. The original Michael Joseph cover by Welsh artist John Griffiths imagines the triffid as a sort of giraffe-shaped artichoke on tuberous legs. Since ‘gigantic artichokes’ rather undersells how tense and scary Wyndham's novel actually is, Griffiths has superimposed spiraling green lines to convey alarm. Still, his conception of triffid was iconic enough for it to be copied across to...