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Wolfe covers

Son of Witz · 02 Jan 2011, 21:36 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: Sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org (Son of Witz)
Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2011 13:36:58 -0800
Subject: (urth) Wolfe covers
In-Reply-To: <889445.66966.qm at web114718.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
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	<889445.66966.qm at web114718.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <9A356FCF-338A-4504-B7E5-0D79A6190091 at butcherbaker.org>


I LOVE the Pennington covers, though they do not match my idea of Urth.
His divergance into an expressionistic pysychedelic landscape is very welcome. They read like awesome paintings inspired by BotNS, but not illustrations of it.  This is often better, because often an illustration is limited to a single moment or scene.

Re: Shirtless. Don Maitz's cover painting for the hardcover BotNS SF Book Club Edition shows his chest, in shadow. Mostly you don't notice it, the cloak dominates.  It's a nice enough painting, but TE is held out like a throbbing hardon, and Severian is framed by a huge full moon, which just seems like inapporopriate symbolic framing for the novel. I just picked up a copy of this. Nice to have it in one volume.


On Jan 2, 2011, at 1:16 PM, Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Tony Ellis <tonyellis69 at btopenworld.com>
> 
> > Hi Daniel,
> > are you familiar with the bewitching covers Bruce Pennington did for
> > the first British paperback edition of the New Sun tetralogy?
> 
> > If not, these clumsy, long-ago scans I did should give you taste:
> 
> > http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~ajellis/WolfeArt.htm
> >
> > The cover for Shadow, in particular, pretty much defines what I see in
> > my head when I think of Urth.
> 
> Oh, goodness, not me, though I like them far better than the covers of the old Timescape paperbacks I have.  But of course that's one of the problems--people see books so differently that no illustrator could match everybody's imaginations.
> 
> It's been customary for decades for fantasy covers to depict the hero shirtless, even when he shouldn't be (as on the cover of my old copy of Hrolf Kraki's Saga, by Poul Anderson).  Has anyone EVER done this for Severian?
> 
> Jerry Friedman
> 
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