[Music]
the first great sci-fi cover artist was
Frank our Paul discovered by the father
of science fiction publisher Hugo
Gernsback in 1914 Paul defined the
imagery that came to be associated with
sci-fi tales his covers of amazing
stories the first magazine devoted
solely to this new genre features
spectacular space ships and spacemen
giant insects laser guns and a lot of
really odd looking aliens in those years
the middle 1920s these covers were
probably among the strangest art that
the average American never got to see on
newsstands these colorful garish
nightmare visions left into the
imaginations of young readers Paul is
such a towering figure in science
fiction because so many influential
writers and artists in the field not to
mention readers can trace their
obsession with the genre to the
unforgettable experience of seeing his
covers for the first time the purpose of
a book cover of course is to draw you in
to pique your interest enough to read
the story behind it but on these covers
Paul launched a fascinating genre of
painting and design that rarely gets the
attention it deserves in the same way
that science fiction and fantasy as
genres historically didn't get the
attention that they deserved
interestingly one of the byproducts I
think of this lack of attention was that
the cover art for these pulp books got
to explore weirder and more avant-garde
artistic styles than they would have
otherwise the revolution in sci-fi
covers came with a revolution and book
selling in 1939 robert de Graaff
launched pocket books the first
mass-market publisher of paperbacks in
America and he was hugely successful
amazing as it sounds no one really
thought that people would read
paperbacks but when the pocket version
of James Hilton's Lost Horizon sold two
and a half million copies people knew
that there was a change in the air as
Mark Derry noted in The Daily Beast
suddenly the 4.3 by 7 inch format of
mass-market paperbacks became the canvas
for cover art
and with more sci-fi selling in with the
genre getting more of its due culturally
publishers look to artists who could
reflect the deep themes that the stories
explored take penguin the British
bookseller in the 40s and 50s they were
known for their classic orange and white
covers than in the 60s in an effort to
raise the sophistication of their
science-fiction offering art director
Germano Fischetti started pairing novels
with covers featuring the work of
popular modern artists for example James
Blish --is a case of conscience takes
place on the planet with organic almost
biological shaped buildings for the
cover Fassett II chose a detail from
Dadaist and surrealist painter Max
ernst's the eye of silence or JG
Ballard's
the Drowned world a post-apocalyptic
novel set an oblique flooded
uninhabitable London for this Fassett II
chose Eve 10g surreal landscape of
battered shapes and odd configurations
called the palace of windowed rocks
after Fassett II a series of art
directors through the 60s and 70s
commissioned original works or did it
themselves there was Alan Aldrich who
created a series of beautiful
psychedelic images over black in the
late 1960s there was Franco Gregg nanny
who pioneered methods of experimental
photography resulting in monochromatic
kaleidoscopic images in 1970 then there
was David Pellom who made this iconic
cover for a Clockwork Orange in 1972 and
these gorgeous reprints of the Ballard
classics a few years later over at
Ballantine Books it was Richard powers
who was really pushing the limits of the
form the Ballantine's essentially gave
powers free rein to pull from all his
modernists and surrealist influences
sometimes pulling completely away from
the actual content of the book the
result was hundreds of covers that could
have easily filled gallery spaces and
modern art museums and while they were
increasingly abstract powers covers mind
the subconscious in the surreal in the
same way that the best science fiction
does they present a world that's warped
often in radical ways as a reaction to
the world that is one of the things I
love about sci-fi cover art is how
accessible it is like literally
accessible you can walk into any use
bookstore any
we're and get five of these old pulp
books for a dollar each I can own a
Vincent to fate and a Bob pepper and Ian
Miller's insane cover for Bradbury's
long after midnight and then the art is
with you it's in your home as you read
the stories it's on your bedside table
its art you hold with your hands it's
not precious it's bent and folded and
creased and above all its weird sci-fi
and fantasy covers had the chance to be
weird not only because of the weird
things going on in the stories but
because the genre was categorized as
pulp and weird imagery sort of came with
the territory there are hundreds of
artists and thousands upon thousands of
books in this tradition I can't possibly
cover it all here partly because a good
amount of it is forgotten hiding away in
crates at the back of bookstores next
time you're at one pull some of those
crates out and see if you can't find a
lost chapter in this eclectic and
underappreciated sub-genre of art
history everybody thank you so much for
watching and indulging me in this
passion I have for sci-fi book covers
I've been wanting to do this video for a
while so I'm really really glad that I
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that's pretty cool thanks again guys
I'll see you next time