(urth) Wolfe covers

[Jerry Friedman]

From: Son of Witz <Sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>


> 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.

Not a bad way to handle it, I think.

> It's a nice enough painting, but TE is held out like a throbbing hardon,

I though you might be exaggerating till I looked at the picture.

http://www.amazon.com/Book-New-Sun-Gene-Wolfe/dp/1568658079

> and Severian is framed by a huge full moon,

(Which is insufficiently green.  And where's the red sunlight?)

> which just seems like inapporopriate symbolic framing for the novel.
...

I agree.  And aha!  My copies of The Road to Corlay and A Tapestry of Time, the 
first and third volumes of Richard Cowper's mostly delightful trilogy The White 
Bird of Kinship, have white circles around the central characters' heads.

http://www.librarything.com/work/49009

The circles match nothing in the story, though the characters are sort of 
saints.  Those covers too are by Don Maitz.

Jerry Friedman


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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