Over the course of my career as a science fiction reader (not that it’s really been that long, being as I am only mumbledy-mumble years old and looking even younger!), I’ve seen my share of cover art.  Some of it’s been OK, some of it’s been bad, and some has been very, very good.

Getting the cover right can make a big deal to the publisher.  After all, they want you to pick up their book in your local bookstore (or online) and buy it, and anything that will make it grab your attention is a good thing.  Moreover, if a picture of a pretty girl in a tin-foil bikini can get you to buy the book even if you never read it (and even if there are no tin-foil bikinis or girls in the book), well, then the cover has succeeded, hasn’t it?

It’s unfortunate, therefore, that I can actually name so very few cover artists.  There are many whose work I’ve admired who will forever be anonymous to me.  Without delving into reference materials (i.e., Wikipedia), I can only come up with four names:

1) Milton Glaser.  Glaser, in the world of Asimov, is notable for having done the illustrations and cover for Asimov’s Annotated “Don Juan.” He also did the covers for the various volumes in the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, the reading of which inspired Asimov to do the Guide to Shakespeare.

2) Barbara Remington.  Anybody who was introduced to J.R.R. Tolkien through the 1960’s Ballantine paperback edition knows Remington’s work.  She did a series of iconic covers for the books which were so striking that Ballantine actually created a triptych from them and published it as a poster.  Unfortunately, the covers were a rush job and she didn’t have time to actually read the books before doing the artwork.  There are therefore imperfect reflections of the contents of The Lord of the Rings, something which bothered Tolkien himself, at the least.  Personally, I don’t mind; the covers are that good.

3) Frank Frazetta.  If you were a teenage boy wandering the science fiction sections of a bookstore in the 1970’s, you knew Frazetta’s work.  He specialized in covers for sword-and-sorcery fantasy-type books, and a typical Frazetta cover would include muscle-bound, dangerous-looking men, muscle-bound, dangerous-looking wild animals, and women.

Oh, the women.

It goes without saying that the average Frazetta woman was on the underdressed side.  She would, however, have fairly realistic proportions, unlike a lot of women gracing book covers.  What made her so striking, however, is that through skillful use of body language and facial expression (often shadowed), Frazetta was able make her radiate a raw, feral sensuality that is unparalleled.  A Frazetta woman looked like she might fuck you senseless, or rip your throat out, or both—horribly dangerous and infinitely desirable.

Excuse me while I go take a cold shower…

4) Michael Whelan.  Whelan won Hugo Awards for Best Professional Artist every year from 1980 through 1986, and he well deserved them.  His covers showed a rare combination of artistic talent with sensitivity to the content of the book, and some of his art is truly iconic.

Now, most Asimov books get one or maybe two cover designs, depending on whether or not they come out in paperback. His more successful books, however, got more covers than that, what with multiple editions and foreign translations.

On the whole, I don’t have multiple copies of Asimov’s books.  It’s tough enough trying to get any edition of all his books without trying to get multiple editions.  I have a number of foreign translations, either because they’re in French or Chinese, which I pretend to be able to read, or because I ran across them while traveling abroad and wanted a souvenir.  My children managed to lose one book and damage another to the point that it could no longer be read, and our budgies ate a large chunk of a third, so they were all replaced.  Beyond that, I tend to get multiple copies only if I run across an edition which has some particular interest.

As it happens, Asimov’s books with probably the most covers are the books of which I have the most copies:  the original Foundation series.  My first copies are paperbacks published by Avon in the early 1970’s.  I also have both a French and traditional Chinese translation, a hardback omnibus (without its dust jacket), an ebook set, and two additional copies of Second Foundation, one of them the original Gnome Press edition of which I stumbled across a cheap copy.

I am very fond of the Avon paperback covers.  They have a very clean design dominated by a white background.  The art is based on cubes, built out of somber colors (green, blue, and orange) with different pictures on each face.  The pictures are a little on the abstract side which helps build an other-worldly, science fiction-y feeling, and they manage to be related to the content of the book.

There is, however, one piece of cover art for the Foundation series which blows them out of the water, and that’s Michael Whelan’s cover for Second Foundation from the 1983 Ballantine/Del Rey edition.  A large copy of the picture is available on Whelan’s Web site.  His other two illustrations for Foundation and Foundation and Empire are very good, too, but this one, I think, beats them both hands down.

One factor which a cover artist has to take into account when creating their artwork is that the cover needs room for some text, too.  At the very least, you should have the book’s title and the author’s name.  Typically, particularly with a paperback book, you’ll have the publisher’s name, a catalog number and price, and quite probably some additional text.  This can be done either by restricting the artwork per se to a part of the cover (as the Avon edition does), or by creating the artwork in such a fashion that part of it can be obscured by the text, which is what Whelan does here.

The picture is of Arkady Darrell standing on Trantor.  She’s been given red hair by Whelan, which right there tends to imply (in our usual stereotyping) an impetuous nature.  Her clothes are loose-fitting and comfortable, and they include boots and a rucksack, so she’s dressed for an outdoor adventure.  Her legs are spread almost as if she’s been caught mid-stride.  Paralleling her legs are two massive, broken metal towers in the distance behind her that stretch up into the blue sky.  In terms of color, the background is subdued—a blue sky, white clouds, haze, silvery metal, and green fields, so that the most colorful thing we can see is Arkady herself.  Even though she is quite small compared to the overall picture (her head is about 40% of the way up from the bottom), she dominates it and is the center of our attention.

It’s truly a spectacular illustration for Second Foundation.  One rather regrets that prints aren’t available at Whelan’s Web site; I’d snatch one up in a flash if they were.  I did, however, the closest thing possible—I bought a copy of the book itself, the only time I’ve added a copy of a specific edition of a book to my Asimov collection for the sake of the cover alone.

Now, note that I said that this is my favorite cover art, not my favorite cover.  I’m afraid that Whelan’s art wasn’t served well by the overall design of the cover.  It’s not a bad cover, by any means, but the purple color and the odd typeface used for Asimov’s names don’t work nearly as well as the art that they’re designed to go with.