The Art of the Mass Market Paperback!

Lately I’ve been going through all the mass market paperbacks I own (an ungodly number, which is part of the reason I’ve been going through them, but more of that in a later post), and as I’ve been looking again at all their covers, I realized something more clearly than I’d ever realized it before: a species of ephemera has quietly crossed into extinction while our attention has been elsewhere. As book production-cost have skyrocketed in the last twenty-five years, the remit of the mass market paperback has narrowed, and certain frills and extras that were once considered standard have all but disappeared – including originally-commissioned cover art. Nowadays, only massively successful novels will even be considered for an eventual mass market release (trade paperbacks being the cost-effective reprint of choice these days), and even those that get it will simply carry over the cover-art they had on their hardcover dust jackets. There’s no chance, for instance, that Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings will get a mass market paperback in the US, but if it did, it would certainly have the same cover as it had in hardcover. Donna Tart’s The Goldfinch was easily successful enough to warrant the financial outlay of a mass market, but again, the cover art stayed the same.

Such was not always the case, of course. During the heyday of the mass market paperback – printed on cheaper paper, designed to be disposable, sold on train station spinner-racks – reprints of hardcover releases got new covers so often it was almost a matter of course. There seemed almost to be an industry understanding that while hardcover new releases were somewhat ‘prestige’ in their permanent solidity (solicited for awards, stacked on bookstore tables during the holidays, etc.), their mass market versions had to compete in a more lurid and flagrant environment in which a stately, subdued cover would fail to grab the attention of harried Larchmont commuters. Very often, new covers were commissioned – and now that they aren’t being commissioned anymore, I find I suddenly miss them!

So I’ll be looking back at them from time to time here at Stevereads, but before I do, I wanted to go slightly off to the side of the theme – because I could hardly talk about mass market cover illustrations without mentioning some of the cheesy (and occasionally otherwise) sci-fi/fantasy covers that so enchanted me back in that glorious era known as the 1980s, now could I? These aren’t precisely examples of what I’m talking about, since a) they’re not paperback reprints of books that had hardcover releases, and b) sci-fi/fantasy is one of the genres where you can very much still find original cover-art even in the cost-conscious 21^st century. But they’re nifty covers all the same! They’ll serve perfectly well as a springboard to the rest!

And of course I could have included a hundred of them here – the period in question being something of a golden age – but I’ll stick to these nine for the time being:

On Wings of Song by Thomas Disch – This rambunctious 1980 novel published by Bantam takes place in the not-so-distant dystopia of the Free State of Iowa, in which idealistic young Danny Weinreb literally dream of flying free over a better world: “He dreamed he was flying over an imaginary Iowa, an Iowa of marble mountains and blithe valleys, of golden, unreal cities and fabulous farms dazzling the eye with fields of Faberge wheat.” The uncredited cover of this Bantam paperback fits the picture to the words, showing a young man overjoyed at the fact that he’s soaring over the farms of Iowa. The cover of a later edition shows an equally happy young man flying over not Iowa but a futuristic city of skyscrapers – not quite as effective, because more pointlessly “sci-fi” in a condescending way.

A Storm Upon Ulster by Kenneth C. Flint – Flint’s 1981 fantasy novel re-telling the story of Cuculain and the other champions of Ulster standing against the glorious power of an angry Irish queen originally had a fairly lackluster cover; in this 1985 reprint the old cover was replaced with a very simple, very evocative illustration by Don Maitz, showing Cuculain as a shirtless hunk with a flaming sword. He’s wearing shredded chain-mail and carrying a nocked and scraped wooden shield, and he’s looking sternly off-stage – it’s a clear, straightforward composition that signals the bounty of action and violence Flint provides in the novel, one of the many he wrote working a light layer of fantasy over the Red Branch stories of Irish mythology.

Procurator by Kirk Mitchell – This 1984 Ace paperback is set in a fantastically-realized alternate history in which ancient Rome never fell and has spread the reach of its empire all over the world (I’ve praised the whole series here at Stevereads). In Procurator the procurator Germanicus is in Anatolia investigating a potential uprising among the “wraphead” zaims, and the paperback sports a wraparound cover by Jim Gurney, who would later go on to immense fame as the creator of the Dinotopia books. Considering the fact that the novel features an enemy force capable of massing and killing legionaries with the power of their minds, Gurney’s decision to illustrate the large Roman tank-galleys making their way through a snowy, forested landscape is counter-intuitive but all the more effective for it, emphasizing the workaday nature of the future empire Mitchell describes so well.

Lost Dorsai by Gordon Dickson – The art of the mass market reaches something of a pinnacle in this 1980 Ace paperback, which not only features an oh-so-late-’70s cover by Fernando Fernandez but also dozens of very evocative black-and-white illustrations throughout this story of Michael de Sandoval, the “lost Dorsai” of the title, a son of the warrior-world of the Dorsai cantonments but himself dedicated to a kind of pacifism that’s alien to the professional mercenaries of his homeworld. I think this might account for the slightly feminine air of Michael in his red tunic on the cover, showing us a Dorsai of a far less military bearing than most of the characters in this long and decidedly uneven series from Dickson.

Hiero’s Journey by Sterling Lanier – Connoisseurs of fantasy artwork won’t have any trouble recognizing the work of Darrell K. Sweet on the 1983 Del Rey cover of Sterling Lanier’s 1973 novel about Per Hiero Desteen, a telepathic warrior-priest in Lanier’s tremendously entertaining post-apocalyptic novel set thousands of years after a great Death that laid waste to all the civilizations of the world. All of Sweet’s trademarks are here, from the fine, fine detail to the penchant for static scenes (this penchant reached utterly disastrous extents in some of his later covers for Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” novels) and especially to specific call-outs to the contents of the books themselves. Here we see Hiero parlaying with one of the intelligent mutated bears he encounters in his travels, and at his back his enormous mutated war-moose Klootz – things that will please readers of the book and deeply confuse newcomers, a risk Sweet always ran, even in these early cover.

Caverns by Kevin O’Donnell – This 1981 Berkley paperback is the first installment in Kevin O’Donnell’s enormously entertaining “Journeys of McGill Feighan,” which chronicles the adventures of the title character, a hapless, floppy-haired young man named McGill, who’s born with the ability to become a “Flinger,” people who can teleport – themselves or other things (up to 918 kilos and not a speck of dust more). McGill’s personal history – he was swallowed by a giant gastropod tourist while he was still a baby, and in his young adulthood he’s an object of special interest to the Far Being Retzglaren, and as the series progresses he faces treachery from inside the ranks of his fellow Flingers and also becomes a kind of foster-father to a quasi-dinosaur, and it’s all grandly done by O’Donnell … and the tone of the series is captured wonderfully by the cover of this first volume, where Janet Aulisio shows poor McGill clearly out of his depth.

The Orphan by Robert Stallman – The cover of Stallman’s wonderful, bittersweet 1980 novel shows a naked, frightened little boy crouching before an enormous furry creature as a huge moon rises behind a barn and silo in the background – and yet the boy is not frightened of the creature; in fact, something in the boy’s wild tangle of red hair suggests a deeper affinity. It’s a fine, simple composition, another by Don Maitz, although the three-line “Timescape” border obliterates his name on the cover itself. Stallman’s book is a lyrical and violent tale of a werewolf in Midwestern America, and the menace and innocence of the story is perfectly conveyed by this cover choice.

King of the Sea by Derek Bickerton – This 1981 Berkley paperback of Bickerton’s 1979 novel shows the novel’s antihero, Andy Holliday, in what becomes his natural habitat: underwater, swimming with dolphins. He comes to that habitat through a steadily-escalating series of disillusionments with his own species, and this blue, striking cover (uncredited, and I don’t recognize the style) captures the culmination of that defection: Halliday declaring a one-man war against the humans who are despoiling the ocean world he’s come to love – the calm faces of the dolphins and the uniform deep blue color contrast very nicely with the explosion happening up on the surface. I’ve praised Bickerton’s novel before here at Stevereads, and it’s always a pleasure to praise it again.

Retief of the CDT by Keith Laumer – No list commemorating the vanished world of classic mass market artwork would be complete without an example of the, shall we say unmistakable work of the artist known as Rowena! I’ve written about her classic cover for Robert Hogan’s Thrice Upon a Time, and here, in this 1979 reprint of Laumer’s 1971 collection of stories starring his two-fisted diplomat of the future, Retief of the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne, she, um, re-imagines the main character, who transmorgrifies from Sean Connery to … well, whatever that is on the cover: bulbously muscular, high-cheekboned, doe-eyed, bare-chested, wearing leotards and a gigantic, futuristic codpiece. We may never know the conversation the artist had with her model before this cover was painted – and we may be fortunate in that.