 The Caverns of Kalte
By :
Deborah Susan Jones :
Editor
This
Legendary Art is "Les Grottes de Kalte" number three of four
paintings created for Editions Gallimard, a French Publisher of young
adult fiction to be precise, and completed on 23rd of January 1985.
Gallimard was based in Paris but had a London office and a meeting
there preceding Christmas proposed the idea of Peter taking on cover
design development of Joe Dever's Lone Wolf roleplay game series for
the French speaking market as Gallimard recognised the key design work
Peter had used to launch Puffin Books Fighting Fantasy series and the
considerable sales numbers it attracted.
 The challenge was a significant one. The deadline was extremely tight. It
was the only Christmas Peter ever worked for a client (though we did
once receive a faxed commission enquiry from an Israeli publisher one Christmas Day)
as he normally reserved that period of the year for private,
experimental or personal work, and the deadline was absolutely
murderous, but he wanted to handle the project so he and I agreed to
"do Christmas in January" and to the sound of B.B. King's "Better not
look down, if you want to keep on flying" he stopped only for the basic
necessities of life until the four covers were complete.
These
first four Lone Wolf (Loup Solitaire) covers were to prove to be the
first in a long line of Lone Wolf titles created for Gallimard as
Peter's cover ideas became extremely popular in France to the extent
that French school children were asking Gallimard to get Peter to sign
editions he had illustrated, ultimately the works proved popular right
across Europe. Edizioni E. Elle in Italy (Trieste) were the printers
for the French series and went on to license and distribute Italian
editions with the images as Licensee of The Solar Wind Picture
Library. Ultimately,
as was also the case with Peter's Fighting Fantasy visualisations, the
Picture Library, which I ran, ended up with a global client list of
licensees of Peter's roleplay Art, from as far apart as Rio de Janeiro
to Sydney.
 During the process, Red Fox in London, who had hitherto
not been involved, also licensed early numbers in the series and then
went on to commission later ones which in turn also got licensed back
to other publishers.
"Once I had created a few covers for Berkley Books
in New York a situation then arose where I was, basically, creating a
cover design for a Lone Wolf series book which had every chance of
being "a global book cover".
In
these days of instant e-mail it is easy to forget the impact that the
humble fax machine, new to the small office market at the time these
works were created, had in terms of the globalising of a studio's
market. More amazing was the fact that, in an era where the PC was
simply not yet on the market, Peter wrote a database to control our
copyright licensing and we ran it off two ZX Spectrums slaved together.
Unbelievable as it must sound now, we ran an entire company off
2 primitive games machines, a dot matrix printer and a thermal fax
machine for quite some considerable time before we managed to acquire a
PC. Even so, primitive though they were, those simple tools and a 35mm
SLR camera that facilitated our catalogue, were, alongside Peter's Art,
the backbone of how we ran Solar Wind, inarguably a global success
story.
 Red
Fox, England; Editions Gallimard, France; Asterios Delithanasis,
Greece, Edizioni E. Elle, Italy, Amber Publishing, Poland and Federal
Publications, Malaysia, just to mention a few users of this particular
picture.
Painted
in Peter's specially invented "Acryloil" technique it has withstood the
test of time and is still as fresh as the Christmas it was created (I
can vouch for that)!
I love all the Dragon pictures he has created and Peter has painted a
lot of them with dedication and skill - and, above all - originality -
they are not "genre derivative". They all appear throughout the 3
volumes (books) of "HEROES & VILLAINS".
Looking back, I'm glad we decided to "do Christmas in January".
Deborah Susan Jones
About "Artist"
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