JG Ballard book covers

In a similar vein to the Burroughs cover gallery, Rick McGrath’s site does the same for one of Burroughs’ followers, JG Ballard. The covers below are two typical examples using Surrealist art as their illustration, The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst and City of Drawers by Dalí. I’ve always loved the pairing of Ernst’s painting (my favourite by that artist) with The Crystal World, a design that Panther carried over to their 1968 paperback edition.

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3 thoughts on “JG Ballard book covers”

  1. Cool… altho I might take umbrage with your assertion that JGB is a Burroughs “follower”. The Sage of Shepperton has long walked his own dog. And yes, while I do have the world’s largest collection of JGB’s first editions, my shrine also contains bibliographies, serious articles, reviews, miscellania, and the usual gamut of web-ripped oddball stuff.

  2. Haste and brevity aside (and an attempt to link two disparate postings), I meant Ballard was a follower in terms of chronology as much as influence.

    It may be debatable but I think he’d say himself that Burroughs had influenced his work, probably more than any other writer. He once said that Burroughs and Genet are “the only writers worth reading” (don’t have the ref, sorry…), states in the RE/Search book that “I’ve always wanted to be in the same book with William Burroughs”, and began writing the Atrocity Exhibition stories two years after penning his Burroughs appreciation for New Worlds in 1964. Both very different writers, of course, and JGB certainly isn’t a slavish imitator, but I wonder whether Ballard’s work would have taken that particular direction in the 1960s without Burroughs’ example (and Moorcock’s encouragement at New Worlds, something I was discussing with MM when I met him in Paris in July).

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