What a gorgeous, evocative cover! Painted by an unknown artist, versions of this appeared on several printings of the late 1970s Pocket Books edition of Jack Vance's The Dying Earth, including the one I first read all those decades ago. In looking for this image, I came across the cover images of many other editions over the years. What struck me is how poor so many of them are, but that's sadly a common problem with Vance's novels and short story collections – a pity.
I love that book. I wish my copy had that cover!
ReplyDeleteTo be fair to other cover artists, Vance stories are awfully hard to illustrate without going fairly abstract like the vista here. Picking just one scene of any of his books to represent the whole is an exercise in futility and frustration. But art directors often demand exactly that (or at least they used to) on the basis of it being better for sales than less concrete imagery.
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