Front to Back: Making History

Part I of a series spotlighting wraparound paperback art.

The Hell-Fire Club, by Daniel P. Mannix (Ballantine, 1969).
Cover illustration by Shannon Stirnweis.

Book covers are such confined surfaces on which to work, it’s no wonder artists sometimes try to continue their creativity across the spine and onto the back, too. Although there are exceptions, this was really more a practice of the past than the present, since today’s jackets are designed for easy, clear shrinkage into JPEG images. As a result, those classic wraparound fronts are even more admired now than they were previously.

If you think about it, extending artwork from the front of a book to its rear was pretty hard to justify. After all, most readers only ever pay much attention to the side where the title and author credits appear. So commissioning a wider painting (or, later, a wide-angle photograph) may not have been money well spent. But it certainly had the potential to give a book—whether issued in hardcover or paperback—some additional distinction.

Over the last decade, I’ve quietly built up computer files filled with these wraparound covers, and have learned several things about them. While it seems every field of fiction has spawned such fronts, the greatest number—by far—have come from the science fiction/fantasy genre. Not all well-known book artists have had equal opportunity to lend their talents to this field, but some familiar names pop up frequently; indeed, a few painters (Ian Miller, Richard Powers, and Tom Adams among them) have made part of their reputations with memorable crossover art of this sort.

There are scans of more than 100 wraparound covers stored on my hard drive (which is probably a modest sampling of the total in existence). To share the lot with you, I’ve divided them according to genre and then grouped titles by the same wordsmiths. I shall roll out those beauties over the next month or so, in irregular posts—beginning today with a gallery of historical novels.

The covers below, mostly from paperbacks, feature art by John Richards (The Golden Exile, Bridal Journey), Art Sussman (Sword in His Hand), John Floherty Jr. (Seminole, Beautiful Humbug), Barye Phillips (Trek East), Shannon Stirnweis (The Sea Witch), Tom Adams (The Rich Are With You Always), James Bama (The Admiral), Robert McGinnis (The Journeyer), and Charles Gehm (Gentlemen of Adventure). Other illustrators are unidentified.

Click on any of the images below to open an enlargement.

As we go along through this series, please let me know if there are any wraparound fronts that should be added to the collections.

FOLLOW-UP: In the early weeks of 2023, I came upon a couple more examples of historical-fiction wraparounds that I just couldn’t ignore. Forbidden City (Fawcett Crest, 1978) and My Enemy the Queen (Fawcett Crest, 1979) both carry artwork by Ted CoConis.

Bouquets for Bama: Speaking of Sensational …

Part of a posthumous salute to artist James Bama.

(Above) The Crown, by Francis Pollini (Bantam, 1968).

Before I began work on this tribute series to James Elliott Bama, who died on April 24 at age 95, I knew little about that New York City-born artist and paperback-cover illustrator. This stands in noteworthy contrast to how I’d started previous celebrations, whether of Robert McGinnis, Robert Stanley, or Ron Lesser.

I wasn’t aware that Bama was the second son born to Benjamin Bama, a Russian immigrant from Minsk, and Selma Sarah Abrams. I was ignorant of the fact that he had idolized Flash Gordon comic-strip creator Alex Raymond as a boy, and that he’d scored his first professional art sale at age 15, when he convinced the New York Journal-American newspaper to purchase his drawing of Yankee Stadium. I didn’t know that he met his wife, New York University art history major Lynne Klepfer, at a party, when he was scouting around for a woman to model for him as a nurse—the subject of his latest cover painting. I was unaware that Bama’s eyesight commenced to fail him in the early 2000s, leading to the end of his career after a half-century.

(Right) James Bama self-portrait, 1972.

Above all, I had no clue as to how long this Killer Covers tribute would run, or how many examples of his artistry I’d want to fit into it. As it turns out, the post you’re reading is the 26th installment—and the last. I’ve been showcasing Bama paperback fronts since the end of April.

Over that time, we’ve seen his influence on crime novels, on westerns, on horror yarns, and of course, on the Doc Savage series with which he is so widely associated. I chose not to showcase Bama’s work for men’s magazines, as Robert Deis has done such a splendid job of that in his own blog. (See here, here, and here.) However, I did recognize Bama’s popularization of white-background paperback fronts, and his painting for the first Star Trek novel.

This series could go on for another month; instead, I’ve decided to close with a galley of 30 additional James Bama fronts (below). Among these you’ll find his illustrations for the “trashy, exploitative” Messalina, by Jack Oleck (Dell, 1963); Philip Roth’s Letting Go (Bantam, 1967); Robert K. Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra (Dell, 1969), one of my mother’s prized examples of historical non-fiction; “the paperback potboiler” The Trojans (Bantam, 1967), by Wirt Williams; Desmond Morris’ “landmark study of human behaviour and evolution,” The Naked Ape (Dell, 1969); and Jack W. Thomas’ Reds (Bantam, 1976), featuring one of my favorite Bama covers.

Also embedded here are six covers he did for Louis L’Amour novels, and four painted for books about Nazi activity in World War II.

Finally, I must acknowledge some of the sources of the art and information used in this series: Michael Stradford’s ever-enlightening blog devoted to model Steve Holland, who posed for many of Bama’s illustrations; Southern California bookseller/books historian Lynn Munroe’s Web site, especially his essential checklist of Bama paperbacks; Leif S. Peng’s Today’s Illustration Group Facebook page, and the wonderful blog Pulp Covers. If you go looking online for examples of Bama’s artistry, including his late-career paintings of western American subjects, there are plenty to enjoy.

Who knew?

Click on the images below for enlargements.