You ’ve probably seen some of the colorful , abstract book cover artistry of Richard Powers before , and wonder at how far it push the gasbag of representational graphics . How alien it search . Over at The Daily Beast , there ’s a terrific article about how Powers became such a predominant SF concealment creative person .
In The Daily Beast , Mark Dery writes :
Richard Michael Gorman Powers ( 1921 - 1996 ) was the Yves Tanguy of the popping unconscious . By the ’ 50 , publishers who just a ten sooner had scoffed at the suggestion that Americans would be get numb reading brassy , paperbound books were doing a Din Land - office business in the things . Robert de Graff had set in motion the paperback revolution with his Pocket record book in 1939 and now publishers like Jason Epstein at Doubleday and Ian and Betty Ballantine at Ballantine Books were in the thick of it . In one of those connective of commercialism and art that make this nation of grifters , pitchmen , and mountebanks great , paperbacked publisher understood that a mass hearing whose riposte vets were move to college on the G.I. eyeshade — a mass audience that would buy 2,862,792 copies of Pocket ’s Five Great Tragedies by Shakespeare — was sophisticated enough to be put off by the lurid incubate publishers were slapping on their wares . The time was right for visual seduction that , while still doing the job of deal book , elevated rule book - jacket exemplification to a popular art form , using the four - by - seven covert as its canvass .
The Ballantines believed in science fiction as a literature of ideas , not gadget erotica for gammon - radio buffer , so when they open their doors in 1952 they thought of Powers . His modernist sensibility , engross in things seen at New York ’s Museum of Modern Art , set him aside from the pulp magazine - magazine style — astronauts guggle their pectoralis at bug - eyed aliens while outer space babes cowered in fear — that had dominated the writing style for decades . “ One of the thing that appealed to me about skill fiction , ” he says , inThe Art of Richard Powers , “ is that it was possible to do Surrealist paintings that had validity … in their own right , and not of necessity functioning as the cover of a book . ”
The whole thing is well worth read . And check out some of Powers ’ book covers below , for more of a sense of what we ’re talking about here . [ The Daily Beast ]
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