From my personal library of disintegrating pulp:
[CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]
My favourite image in the above group is Lehr’s wraparound cover for John Boyd’s The Rakehells of Heaven, even though the display font used for the title and author name is overbearing and, in places, difficult to decipher! To view all of the covers with art by Paul Lehr that I’ve posted so far, click here.
None of the following three covers with art by Paul Lehr really hits the mark. The painting on the cover of Hellstrom’s Hive (1982) is especially anemic; as far as I am concerned, it has very little of interest to say about Frank Herbert’s novel, the SF genre, Lehr’s chosen subject matter, or anything else other than, perhaps, the vain hope that slick technique alone would be enough to fulfil the brief. (Yes, I understand the idea here is that the viewer is supposed put together the visual clues to realize that the red barn, farm house, windrows of hay, etc., are actually located on a planet that is not earth, and that the tiny figures on the hill are not merely your typical human farmers but something more sinister; however, when such a simple idea is so blandly and schematically worked out, how can the viewer’s reaction be anything but boredom?) The fact that Lehr’s hypothetical hope turned out to be not so vain after all — the painting, obviously, was published — seems to me to have been less likely an endorsement of the painting as an effective cover illustration and more likely a tribute to Lehr’s long track record as a distinctive, reliable, and admired SF cover artist.
Click here to view all of the covers with art by Paul Lehr that I’ve posted so far.
To view all of the covers with art by Paul Lehr that I’ve posted so far, click here.
A nice variety of covers by Lehr this time around. I especially dig Lehr’s 1967 cover for Margaret St. Clair’s The Dolphins of Altair, even if the exact location of the dorsal fin on the central dolphin (who, to Lehr’s credit, really looks like he is carrying a weight on his back) is slightly mysterious. I don’t know about you, but I’m happy to chalk this one up to artistic license… the fin is entirely hidden by the woman’s body and that’s all there is to it…
Click here to view all of the covers with art by Paul Lehr that I’ve posted so far.
Somebody out there likes Paul Lehr’s work; I know this not because people post to tell me they like it but because the Ragged Claws Network blog stats show regular visits to the Paul Lehr category. So, on with the show:
Notice that the publication dates of these covers by Paul Lehr, scanned just this morning directly from the library of yours truly, range from 1969 to 1980. I’m sure some people think of Lehr as a bit of a one-trick pony, but with this little group of four, one gets a nice sense of Lehr’s quiet versatility as an image maker, in a nutshell, as it were. Oddly enough, Frazetta later painted an image, entitled Torment (1986), of a guy impaled on a curvilinear structure that would not look out of place in the future city hinted at in the Gunner Cade cover — which perhaps tells you all you need to know about Frazetta’s attitude to modernity — but Lehr’s flamboyantly attired, bubble-helmeted hero is about as far from the half-naked, heavily muscled, hard-charging Frazetta archetype as one can get. Yes, the Glory Road and Power of Blackness covers are fairly typical Lehr productions; however, with the cover for The Centauri Device, Lehr charges boldly into John Berkey territory, and acquits himself very well indeed.
The Knight novel has no publication date (n.d.) but is copyright 1965:
Click here to view all of the covers by Paul Lehr that I’ve posted to date.
Click here to view all of the Paul Lehr paperback covers I’ve posted so far.
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