Just read a book by George Alec Effinger and while researching him found this amazing image. It’s from Luminist Bookstore, which seems to have a great variety of pulp, sci-fi and horror books and magazines.

Boris Vallejo, 1976

from the magazine 1984, Feb. 1979. An “adult” fantasy publication that ironically went bankrupt before it ever saw the year 1984. As for this particular comic, man  what a title. If some budding band out there didn’t just find their new stage name, I have failed. See “the SPUD” after the jump – it’s actually a pretty great drawing.

The treasure trove of gorgeous, vintage dust jackets of supernatural, fantasy, western, adventure and mystery novels to gaze upon on the exhaustive website Violet Books is remarkable. I’ve posted a mere small portion of my favorites here, please take a look at the original website for many more.

While Dreamscape with Dennis Quaid is not necessarily a masterpiece, it does make for great afternoon viewing and begins with a great visual nightmare.

The Chronicles of Gor series by John Norman is a personal favorite. I fell into the misogynistic lore after purchasing John Norman’s Imaginative Sex.

If you guessed that this book was about a spaceman landing on a moon of Saturn, infiltrating a futuristic city made up primarily of observatories, dealing with a seemingly hostile bat-winged, goat-headed, ray-gun wielding monster reminiscent of the aliens from Childhood’s End, then doing battle with a sanitation man after being transformed into a chimpanzee zombie all while falling in love with a beautiful space iguana, I’m sorry to say that you’d be wrong.

In fact, Showboat World has absolutely nothing to do with this illustration; it’s far more interesting, and it’s mainly about MacBeth.

However, if you guessed that this novel was about a rugged individualist who feels unfairly subjugated by a greedy sea monster and resentful of the theocratic class that serves it (the monster), and that the story takes place on a planet without any solid land where humans (descendants of the survivors of a prison ship) live on a tiny kelp archipelago, you’d be absolutely right

The only books I ever seriously considered stealing from my elementary school library, the cover art is by the late Roger Hane. Here’s a gallery on Flickr showcasing more of his work.

Cover of Kilgore Trout (aka Philip Jose Farmer)’s Venus on the Half Shell


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