 The Planet Darkover
The Heirs of Hammerfell. A book by
Marion Zimmer Bradley.
By Deborah Susan Jones : Editor
One of a number of
Marion Zimmer Bradley paperback book covers created by
Peter Andrew Jones illustrating a story set in the time
of the Planet Darkover's Hundred Kingdoms
The story
concerns itself with the conflict driven growth pangs of
the twin sons of the Duke of Hammerfell and the various
squabbles and issues relating to and within the family.
Peter's involvement with the entire
Arrow Books series, published in the UK (and
Commonwealth) Market arose, as did so many of his
commissioned works in the 80's, because the series was
languishing, with no sales being made: something radical
had to be done to reinvigorate it.
Art Director Dennis
Barker at Arrow had proposed displaying the cover art in
a narrow band wrapping around the book, with bands top
and bottom of the book left as plain colour.
When Peter
then drew-up a large scaled-up layout of this structure
to use as a template for creating the final artwork, he
spontaneously invented and added the "MZB" logo
overlapping the plain colour top band and the area where
the illustration appeared.
It was not typical, so not a part of
the cover brief, for an illustrator to add-in a
logo to the initial visual concept drawing, in this case
Dennis Barker chose to adopt the logo design, and so a
completely new "look" for the series had been invented
via a spontaneous cooperation of talents.
A second, more
crucial aspect to the design, layout, and ultimately the
rendering and execution of the paintings, was that
the publisher, faced with a series of books that it
still held a number of years reproduction rights in but
with no sales coming in, was focused on "pushing the
series over into the main market", a marketing thrust
many publishers were choosing at that time in order
to broaden their sales possibilities and as such,
creating a science fiction cover that was mainstream not
genre was a whole new skill that had to be developed.
A Jones-Barker
classic!
|
Join
our
monthly
Newsletter
