Ragged Claws Network

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 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.

The 1964 edition of The Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke with the cover by Paul Lehr is a pretty cool find, I think. It’s a pity the artwork is obscured by the title, etc., but the book is in excellent condition, so it scanned fairly nicely, and of course, it is instructive to compare it with Lehr’s later covers, which, unlike The Deep Range, typically combine highly saturated colours with a strict adherence to traditional colour schemes.

That makes 16 covers by Paul Lehr displayed here, with more to come…

Note that the first two paperback covers below are from early in Lehr’s career as a cover artist while the third one is from fairly late in Lehr’s career:

Whenever I see SF paperback covers by Paul Lehr like the nine I posted yesterday, and the many others he created in a similar vein, I immediately think of Arnold Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” paintings and, to a lesser extent, ”The Sacred Wood”:

I was tempted to file the comparison between Böcklin and Lehr under “Call and Response,” but I guess I am just not quite convinced myself that there’s any direct influence from one to the other — although the impossibly jagged cliffs in Lehr’s cover for Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead (strange coincidence!) are tantalizingly similar, visually, to the trees in Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead” variations. Or maybe I’m just seeing things!

From the bookshelves of yours truly, here are nine paperback covers (ten, actually; a bonus image was added at a later date) by Paul Lehr, along with one Lehr-ish cover by another hand: