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Yes, it’s been a busy year. These are books three and four respectively of the titles I’ve been designing for Tachyon Publications, and there are more on the way.
Kage Baker’s The Hotel Under the Sand is a charming fantasy for children concerning the hotel of the title and its curious inhabitants, which include a ghost [...]

Two samples from a great Flickr set of science fiction and fantasy paperback covers. Both these titles were first published in 1976 and, unlike many Flickr postings, this set gives credit to the cover artists where known. The Moorcock book is one of his Elric volumes and while it isn’t a favourite of mine, the [...]

Panther Books paperback edition, 1968; cover painting: The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst.
If I can’t remember when I first encountered JG Ballard’s work, it’s not because I was reading him at a very early age, more that a childhood enthusiasm for science fiction made his books as omnipresent in my early life as any [...]

top left: Leo & Diane Dillon (1969); top right: Tom Huffman (1968).
bottom left: Gray Morrow & Henry Berkowitz (1967); bottom right: no credit.
Great examples of typically florid Sixties’ cover design at Font of all Wisdom – Unique lettering in design, a Flickr pool. The masterful Leo & Diane Dillon illustrated many of Harlan Ellison’s [...]

Patrick McGoohan as Number Six.
“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”
The Prisoner, which ran for seventeen episodes from 1967 to 1968, was the best original drama series there’s ever been on television. Period, as Harlan Ellison would say. Best because it grabbed the format of [...]

So it arrived at last, yesterday in fact, the colossal volume that is A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft from Centipede Press. Calling this a book is like calling the Great Pyramid of Cheops a pile of stones, technically accurate but the words somewhat fail to convey the existential reality. This is the [...]

Harlan Ellison.
“You have somebody who is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.”
Neil Gaiman on Harlan Ellison, and so say all of us. The quote comes from a trailer for Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a new documentary about Ellison’s life and work which, as far as I can tell, has yet to [...]

The Bradbury Building, 304 South Broadway, Los Angeles.
This looks like an old photograph but it actually dates from 1989 and comprises part of the Changing Times: Los Angeles in Photographs, 1920-1990 archive that the UCLA Library has recently made public.
The Bradbury Building (constructed in 1893) was one of the few places I insisted on searching [...]

The Singing Citadel (1970).
Michael Moorcock’s Elric books are being prepared for republication by Del Rey in the US next year. I’ve assisted with some minor parts of this preparation, including sourcing pictures from Savoy’s edition of Monsieur Zenith the Albino. (Anthony Skene’s albino anti-hero is a precursor of Moorcock’s albino anti-hero.)
Discussion of the [...]