Covers Unbound

The more I look for recent covers to feature in Wonders & Visions, the more I find myself coming to a slightly glum conclusion: that in the last decade or two, typeface/title design has been taking increasing prominence over art. Just a couple of recent examples:  There are plenty of plausible - and indeed reasonable - reasons why this might be happening: the need to distinguish a book for the reader seeing a postage stamp-size image on an online bookshop; the same constraint but with an e-book reader's library display; the much-increased scope for typeface creativity with modern design tools. (And this isn't a trend unique to sff either.) But there's one clear consequence. It's a lot less clear, just from the covers, what these books are about. The covers may convey a mood (a vibe, as the young people say), but they don't depict place in the same way as many earlier covers did. That's particularly acute for sf since - as I'll argue in my next post - sf...

  Australian author Andrew Tomas wrote what we might call SF-adjacent books; like Erich von Däniken or Graham Hancock, he speculated about pseudo-scientific, alien-contact and what amount to alt-historical accounts of human chronology. We Are Not The First: Riddles of Ancient Science (1971) is a less outlandish book than many in this idiom, arguing as it does only that what we think of as modern science—atomic theory, heliocentrism, electricity and so on—were all known to the ancients, which is mostly true (there's some further-fetched argumentation in the book too, including the claims that the ancients had anti-gravity tech and could transmute base metals to gold). But I'm interested here in this striking cover-art for the 1972 paperback edition, artist unknown. The surreal blending of multiple faces into one UFO-shaped flying head, such that faces overlap, sharing noses and eyes, is a rebus of alien compositeness, implying perhaps a harmony to which we, separate and forked-...

Chris Achilléos, ‘Head of Medusa’ (1988) Stare into the snaky head of corporate branding and grow petrific, art!. Cypriot-born British artist Chris Achilléos worked on the borderline of illustration and art. His hyper-realist etching-style drawings of recognisable actors and celebrities—for the covers of tie-in novelisations of the Doctor Who and Star Trek, franchises, as well as for various movie posters—are enhanced with colours and patterns. To take just Doctor Who covers he worked on, from the 1970s through to the 1990s: The faces of the first four doctors are precisely, almost photographically rendered—although Tom Baker lacks the accuracy and vividness of the others, looking more like Virginia Wade in a wig than a time lord; and the reproduction of various Doctor Who villains—Davros, a Sontaran warrior, a cyberman, and in the middle the most famous of the Doctor’s antagonists, the Daleks. Does it matter that, for all his photorealist penwork, Achilléos manifestly can’t...

  The French science-fiction magazine Métal Hurlant was founded in December 1974 by comics artists Jean Giraud (who worked as ‘Mœbius’) and Philippe Druillet, in consort with writer Jean-Pierre Dionnet and finance director Bernard Farkas. These four friends called themselves ‘Les Humanoïdes Associés’—United Humanoids—and this was the name they gave the publishing house that issued the magazine: quarterly to begin with, then, after the ninth issue, monthly. Each issue was 68-pages of text and illustration, 16 of which were full colour. It sold for 8 francs an issue—a substantial sum for a magazine in the 1970s. The magazine cover boasted, rather than warned, that it was ‘reservé aux adultes’, ‘adults only’: an indication that much of the art was sexually suggestive, and in some cases quasi-pornographic, as well as often violent and grotesque. A great many significant European science-fiction artists contributed to the magazine, and whilst it never entirely flourished, commerciall...

  For most of their history books had no cover art, except in rare and exceptional instances. Books, as codices (a codex is book bound-up by joining pages, as opposed to a rolled scroll) might have plain wood, or plain leather, covers. Scrolls, the dominant form of ‘published’ text throughout antiquity, began to be superseded by codices in the first centuries after the birth of Christ. By about AD 500 they had replaced the older form. It’s not hard to see why: scrolls are physically awkward to read, unprepossessing little cylinders to look at. Codices can have numbered pages, easier to read, and also to reference. Codices can have covers, which protect the pages from wear and tear, and they can have spines, upon which details of the book can be inscribed, making them easier to store and retrieve. And another thing a codex permits is: an illustrated cover, something attractive in itself, and something that can market the book to potential purchasers. But for the majority of the las...