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The Caverns of Kalte(From the book "Heroes & Villains")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
