/lit/ - Literature

>>10124252
The Decline and Fall of the Book Cover
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-book-cover

>I was a nerdy sci-fi-reading kid in the seventies. The so-called golden age of book and magazine illustration had died out some decades earlier, with the advent of color photography and improved print reproduction, but superb illustration was still thriving in the marginal niches of pulp and genre covers. Richard Powers, who illustrated the cover of what seemed like every science fiction paperback published in the nineteen-sixties, was influenced by surrealists like Roberto Matta and Yves Tanguy, and painted landscapes where monumental amorphous forms stood like alien architecture or colossal carcasses on indistinct plains. Ian Miller’s covers for Bantam’s editions of Ray Bradbury looked as though they were drawn by a lunatic imprisoned with only a straight edge and a compass—mechanical fantasias of girders and circuitry enclosing grotesque, half-molten faces. This was also a time when the aesthetics of psychedelia were filtering down into children’s pop culture, so that my editions of C. S. Lewis’s Christian allegories and John Christopher’s juvenile science fiction looked as if they were painted by Peter Max, every object seemingly sculpted out of foam. The blowing of minds was an artistic priority.