The Lettered Image and the Unlettered

 

Most SF art (though not all of it, of course) is commissioned to be used in specific production contexts: as a book or magazine cover, a film poster, a video-game casing. To that end the science fiction artist must adjust his or her image-making to the exigencies of the lettering: a title, author's or authors' name(s), perhaps a blurb. Above is the cover for Andre Norton's edited collection of short-fiction Space Police (1955), painted by Virgil Finlay: a dynamic image, dominated by the near-by figure of a space policeman climbing near the top of a vertiginous alien cliff-face, which leads the eye down, along a plunging pulled-perspective, to his colleague far below him, and further still two more officers of space-law beside their silver spaceship. Finlay has left the top third of the image undetailed, with just the intimation of the far side of the crater wall visible, so that the title of the volume, the editor's name and a brief blurb (‘thrilling tales about interplanetary and galactic policemen in action’) can be accommodated onto the cover. This lettering is a necessary part of the book as product: to let potential purchasers know what the book is, who has edited it, why they might be interested in buying it. 

The question is, does the art work better with or without the lettering? Here is Finlay's original image.

The contrast is a little overcued in this reproduction (the far walls of the crater are almost swallowed in darkness) but you can see sharper detail in the lower two-thirds of the painting, including Virgil Finlay's insectile-looking signature by the nearest space cop's boot. The image is more spacious, less cluttered by all those words on the actual cover, which opens up the perspective and the sense of—as we might say—space. It looks tautological to say that space art that includes more empty space is more spacious, but such amplitude, the greater intimation of immensity, works brilliantly here.

On the other hand, the open spaces of this Finlay painting exist not to invite us imaginatively into the sublimity of deep space, but to allow for those necessary words. This was his commission, as you can see from his initial pencil sketch.

Finlay gives the compositors a number of options for the location of the title (unless the smaller SPACE POLICE in the top left corner is his suggestion for where the spine of the book should be folded). Here the background is busier, and the lettering more a piece with the crenulations and crags of the cliff-face, which might almost be Cs and Us. And perhaps the combination of art and lettering has its own distinctiveness and appeal. Letters are, as design, attractive shapes, and the addition of title and author create a specific layer in the image's visual field that exists in attractive tension with the rendered perspective of the whole. It is certainly less attractive in this 1956 ‘Hard Cover Library’ reprint, and not just because the image has been so harshly cropped, simplified and recoloured, but because the lettering has been uglily separated from the image it serves.