Wonders and Visions: Introduction Draft

 

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 Scrolls, the dominant form of ‘published’ text throughout antiquity, began to be superseded by codices in the first centuries after the birth of Christ.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 last millennium this was not an opportunity of which publishers availed themselves. For much of this long history, the covers of codices were thin panels of wood (more rarely, metal), or rectangles of leather. With more expensive books the leather might be tooled: that is, worked with inset gilded designs or patterns. But full-colour cover-art was, for most of the history of the book, reserved to the most expensive and rare titles, the sorts of items owned by kings, princes and popes. Most Bibles were bound in plain leather, but there were Bibles with covers inset with many precious stones and jewels. A Book of Armes of England, created by Esther Inglis in 1609, for Henry, Prince of Wales, was covered in velvet with the royal crest picked out in pearls.

This was the exception not the rule. Most books covers were plain. The first publishers to issue books with printed covers—as opposed to covers tooled with designs in gilt—were the Baudoin brothers, who issued a 75-volume Complete Works of Voltaire in 1826. But the paperback covers for these volumes were not illustrated as such: they bore the title, Œuvres Complètes du Voltaire, details of the specific volume and an engraved emblem (two leaf-fringed circlets, one showing the goddess of wisdom throned, the other the printers’ initials BF, ‘Baudoin Frères’). Later in the century French publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814 –1886) published hardback titles with gilt illustrations, starting with the Le Magasin d’éducation et de recreation ‘Storehouse of Education and Recreation’ in 1862. Hetzel’s gorgeous edition of Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires (‘Extraordinary Journeys’), from 1863 to the end of the century, are discussed below. By the end of the century many books were issued with gilt and sometimes coloured illustrations pressed onto their covers.

A parallel development was the dust jacket. In the 1820s British publisher William Pickering (1796 –1854) issued various gift books and annuals with paper sheathes, to protect the silk or leather binding of the actual book. These would usually be torn away, like wrapping paper, and discarded, by the purchaser—books from this period with these original covers are extremely rare (in 2009, the discovery of one such, an 1830 edition of Friendship’s Garland with its paper cover, by the Bodleian library was excitedly reported in the press). Today’s familiar wraparound dust jackets date from the 1850s, although the format didn’t become common until the 1890s. These nineteenth-century dust jackets would be plain, or would simply reproduce in monochrome the coloured design on the binding beneath. After 1900 the economics of publishing made illustrated or decorative book bindings less common, and the art migrated to the dust jackets. By the 1920s and 1930s coloured art and creative typography on dust-jackets was common. 

Dust jackets were also typically discarded, and sometimes are even today. Critic John Clute’s The Book Blinders records, and critiques, what he calls the ‘vandalism’ of the British Library, which routinely throws-away the dust-jackets of all the books it archives. So we have fewer of them than would be ideal.

The book jacket evolved from a simple utilitarian object into a highly visual and conceptualised means of communication. While the first book jackets date to the 1820s, until late in the century they had only been used as protective packaging and tended to be nonpictorial, labelled wrappers with no design … by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century the book jacket began to take root as a promotional tool and its design began to receive more attention. [Ned Drew, Paul Sternberge, By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design (Princeton Architectural Press 2005), 20]

In the 1930s, paperback book publication began in earnest. German publisher Albatross Books began this new idiom in 1931, printing books with standard sizes. The covers bore author and title only rather than art, with different genres were colour-coded. This style was copied by the British publisher Allen Lane when, in 1935, he set up Penguin books, and then again when Robert de Graaf created Pocket Books in 1939 in the USA. Albatross went out of business during World War 2, but Penguin and Pocket Books both thrived. Indeed, in American Pocket Books was so successful that ‘pocket book’ became synonymous with paperback, as in France, where livre de poche is still in use today. As more publishers opened paperback imprints, the pared down styles of Albatross and Penguin gave way to more expressively and lavishly illustrated. The 1960s saw a big boom in paperback publication, in Science Fiction and Fantasy as much as any genre, with often beautifully, highly coloured and dynamically designed cover art.

Critics disagree as to when ‘science fiction’ originates. Some consider works of fantastical adventure, voyages to the moon and sun, automata and alien visitations going back to the first centuries after Christ, to be SF. Others date the genre from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—this is Brian Aldiss’s influential argument—or from the success of Jules Verne and H G Wells in the latter decades of the nineteenth-century. But science-fiction art, and SF cover-art, is a more recent phenomenon.

New technologies at the end of the nineteenth-century made book and magazine production more cost effective. Paper, which had previously been made from rags, began increasingly to be manufactured much more cheaply out of chemically pulped wood chips. The ‘Kraft process’ invented by German chemist Carl F Dahl in 1879 was put into commercial operation in the 1890s, breaking down wood pulp with special chemicals and reconstituting it as paper and by the early twentieth-century this cheaper paper became dominant. It enabled magazines to be printed in large quantities and sold inexpensively: the name ‘pulps’ (‘a magazine or book containing lurid subject matter and characteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper’ as the dictionary defines the term) comes from this process—more expensive magazines, printed on higher quality paper, were called ‘slicks’, or ‘glossies’. Though wood-pulp paper was serviceable and affordable it lasts poorly, tending to brown and become brittle over time, especially when exposed to sunlight. This makes the collection of pulp magazines a precarious business, and 1920s and 1930s Pulps are not now as they were when they were first put on sale.

The first pulp magazine was Argosy, launched in 1896 and containing 190-pages of stories and articles. The Popular Magazine, established in 1903, introduced coloured cover art, something made financially practicable by the recent development of various cheaper ink dyes developed from coal tar. All manner of genre-specific pulp magazines sprouted up throughout the nineteen-teens and 1920s: crime pulps like Dime Detective, Spicy Detective and Black Mask, romance pulps like Love Story Magazine, Western pulps like Western Story Magazine, adventure pulps like Adventure and Thrill Book, and horror or weird pulps like Weird Tales (founded 1923). The first dedicated science fiction pulp was Amazing Stories launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback. Astounding Stories of Super-Science followed in 1930. Both magazines are still in print, although they have followed complicated paths as the commercial environment has changed, and the latter is now called Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Many more science-fiction pulps were published in the 1930s and 1940s, and their bright-hued, fantastic cover art came to define a mode. This is a matter of style and render as much as content, although it is the content of these images that most people think of when they think of ‘SF pulp art’: handsome, muscular men dressed in ways that code ‘the future’; beautiful women dressed, or more to the point, creatively undressed so far as the morality codes of the era permitted, to titillate and excite heterosexual readers (and, inadvertently one presumes, gay female readers) in postures of peril—menaced by monstrous alien lifeforms, or alarming robotic machines—such that the handsome future-male can come to her rescue, toting a ray-gun pistol or wielding his meaty fists; items of large-scale extrapolated technology such as gigantic spaceships, gleaming high-tech cities, space-stations, robots, that kind of thing; landscape art of alien planets. The dominant stylistic idiom here was a kind of poster verisimilitude, such that unrealistic elements are painted with a kind of visual realism, or pseudo-realism; although the staging and compositions parlay melodramatic and exaggerated intensities—strong, almost caricature diagonals and forced perspectives—and tonally the compositions might be sinister, lubricious or brash. In almost all there are bright, usually contrasting colours and an aversion to blandness, or visual ambiguity.

Science fiction book publication was mostly hardback through the 1940s and 1950s, but paperback publication rose to prominence in the field in the 1960s and 1970s, and came to dominate the book market, the main format in which books were sold. They remained this unril the development and subsequent prominence of e-books in the 2010s, although here the formatting mimics the older codices, including replicating the style and presentation of paperback cover-art.

Much of the artwork for cience fiction paperback covers continued the visual styles and semiotics of the old pulp magazines, which in large part paperbacks replaced in the market, although other styles and visual modes were also common. The logics of high-art surrealism worked their way into some SF cover art, construing ‘the fantastic’ as oneiric recapitulation in similar ways to Magritte, Ernst and Dalí. Sometimes, artists responded to the commission to illustrate the bizarre and peculiar conceits of science-fiction with something approaching abstract art. Images derived from the increasing repository of astronomical observation were popular: stars and galaxies, planets and comets and nebulae. Mostly, SF cover art developed a group of visual indicators that indexed science-fiction content, a (to use the technical term) semiology of SF: humans in futuristic clothes; futuristic technology, spaceships, cities; stars and planets; alien landscapes of fauvist colouration; alien beings of various arresting and inventive shapes, some humanoid, some based on other animals—giant cats, octopi—some more bizarre and without earthly analogue. Covers often include nudity, or at least nudity modified to avoid censorship by barely obscuring or covering with wisps of cloth genitals and secondary-sexual characteristics: pneumatic young women in skimpy dresses, bikinis, or their nakednes covered by other kinds of fig leaf: foliage, arms, posture; stacked young men in loincloths engaged in activities, usually belligerent, to show-off their musculature to best strenuous advantage. 

‘Futuristic’ clothing, conveniently for this soft-core aesthetic, often amounts to nothing more than a tight-clinging sheath of future-fabric, giving the subjects the look of nudes who have been spray-painted, a notional compromise to modesty that in fact puts the whole naked body on display.  

We can read this as soft-core lubriciousness, pandering to an audience of, in many cases, glandular adolescent randiness; or we could locate it within the traditions of fine art nude studies. Of course, we might consider this latter culture actually the same thing as the former. 

If the nude is one tradition of western art, landscape painting is another, and science-fiction contributes to this too, with many alien worlds and topographies, and outer-space vistas fronting many a magazine and book. Given the genre's technological fascinations, these are as often as not cityscapes.    

Cover art, and its artists, are part of the tradition of modern art more generally conceived, although academic art historians rarely if ever consider it or the artists who create it (an exception was when British artist Glenn Brown was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2000 with a work of art that imitated—plagiarised, some said—the cover-art of the 1973 Granada paperback reprint of Robert Heinlein’s Double Star, by Tony Roberts.

Glenn Brown, The Loves of Shepherds (after ‘Doublestar’ by Tony Roberts), 2000

It may be that the currents of cover-art—spacey, alien landscape, vastness of technological artefacts—are at odds with the mainstream of ‘high’ art. Writing in 1963, art critic David Sylvester said:

Now, for one reason or another, close-up seems to be the natural viewpoint of the twentieth-century painter. It is not fortuitous that the famous long-shots of twentieth-century painting are the endless beaches of the type of Surrealism whose conception of space is a deliberate negation of the twentieth century’s and is, moreover, a nostalgic symbol of history — space meaning time. The close-up view is an inevitable consequence of the twentieth century’s predilection for flat and simple design. Its affective implications can vary. It can aggrandise. Most often it signifies a refusal to maintain ‘a respectful dist, ance’, expresses a will to intimacy, whether that of sympathy or that of insolence: either way it is anti-heroic. David Sylvester, About Modern Art: Critical Essays, 1948-1997 (New York : Henry Holt 1997), 123]

SF cover art does sometimes work with, in effect, close-ups; but more often it pulls back to widescreen, landscape and consciously heroic—as well, often, to surrealistic—images. A book provides a relatively small canvas for an artist, and a paperback or pocket book a very small one; it takes skill to turn miniaturisation to vistas of scale and giganticism. Here is another cover-art landscape, from the 1964 Ballantine paperback first publication of Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick. The artist is American Ralph Brillhart (1924-2007), and he creates not just a superb sense of alienness, but of scope and scale in a small format:

The difference in colouration between the original painting and its appearance on the front of the paperback is instructive: coal-tar dyes had unlocked affordable colour for publishers, and was dveloped into large-scale petrochemical dye production in the twentieth-century (most commercial dyes today are derived from petrochemicals, although some are manufactured out minerals and even insects). But the mode of reproduction involves ‘three-colour printing’: a black outline is printed and then the image is printed again on the same place with differing spreads of, in turn, red, green and blue, the thre primary colours. Overlaying these generates the other colours, such that red and green combine to make yellow, red and blue to purple, green and blue yield cyan. The method is not impeccable, and cannot always capture the full range of colours of the original artwork: here the red is overdominant, and the more subtle pinks and buffs are oversatured scarlet. Modern printing technologies have improved the variety and subtlety of colour reproduction, drawing on a much larger colour-field and utilising ink dot spreads with ever higher dpis or dots per inch.

Robert Weinberg’s statement that ‘Science Fiction and Fantasy, by the very nature of the material presented, is a visual medium’ might be thought confirmed by the primacy of visual media where the genre is concerned: the SF film, TV show, video game. Written SF has always been a relatively small-scale business, but SF movies are big business. Star Wars (1997) and its many sequels are amongst the highest-grossing and culturally impactful movies ever made. 

Over the years, book cover design stopped being an offshoot of book design (where typographers do their stuff) and became a graphic arena in which art directors commission all sorts of specialists. Photographers, illustrators, calligraphers, collagists, model-makers and typographers, singly or in groups, try to make each title sparkle or frown (or whisper even). They aim to seduce wayward customers who don’t already know the book they came to shop for. If they pause and look, pick up and read, they may also buy. The product and the advertisement are bound up together. [Peter Campbell, ‘Penguin by Illustrators’ London Review of Books 31:17 (10 September 2009)]

Cover-art does function as an advert for the book: a good cover—a well-designed and executed stylish or intriguing image—can make a potential reader in the bookshop, or scrolling online, pick out a book she otherwise knows nothing about. I have certainly bought books because their covers are so beautiful or effectively rendered, and more than once. But the cover is not merely an ad. As Marco Sonzogni says, ‘book covers can be seen as a doorway through which we glimpse the text … it is the threshold between the public commercial arena where the book is for sale and the more intimate world of the text where the author speaks to us alone.’ [Marco Sonzogni, Re-Covered Rose: A Case Study in Book Cover Design As Intersemiotic Translation (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2011), 10]

We can use Gerard Genette’s term and call a book cover a paratext: something that is not the actual text—not the book itself, not the story—but is related to the text. For Genette the cover is ‘a threshold, or a “vestibule” that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back. It is an “undefined zone” between the inside and the outside, a zone without any hard and fast boundary on either the inward side (turned toward the text) or ‘the outward side (turned toward the world’s discourse about the text), an edge.’ Indeed, Genette thinks the cover ‘in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text’ [Genette, 2]. The SF cover is an invitation to step away from mundane reality, to pass through into a world of imaginative extrapolation, a fantastic and amazing realm.

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Peter Campbell, ‘Penguin by Illustrators’ London Review of Books 31:17 (10 September 2009)

Jane Frank, Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009)

Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation ([1987] translated by Jane E. Lewin: Cambridge University Press 2009)

Mark Godburn’s Nineteenth-Century Dust-Jackets (2016)

Steve Holland and Alex Summersby, Sci-Fi Art: A Graphic History (Collins Design 2009)

Rian Hughes, Rayguns and Rocketships: Vintage Science Fiction Book Cover Art (Korero Press 2022)

Pete Masterson, Book Design and Production: a Guide for Authors and Publishers (Aeonix Publishing Group 2005)

Alastair McCleery, ‘Publishing in the Long Twentieth-century’, in Leslie Howsam (ed), Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (Cambridge University Press 2015)

Adam Rowe, Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s (Abrams 2023)

Marco Sonzogni, Re-Covered Rose: A Case Study in Book Cover Design As Intersemiotic Translation (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2011),

George Thomas Tanselle, Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use (Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 2011)

Gary Westfahl, George Slusser and Kathleen Church Plummer (eds), Unearthly Visions: Approaches to Science Fiction and Fantasy Art (London: Bloomsbury Academic 2002)