July 27th 1972 – The Paperback Covers Of Chris Foss

My memory is that Chris Foss’ sci-fi covers were everywhere in 1972. But I’ve long put that down to the fantastical mono-focus of my then-prepubescent mind. Reading 2011’s excellent Hardware: The Definitive SF Works Of Chris Foss, I’m surprised to find my shockingly fallible memory has actually been telling me the truth. What an amazing productive artist Foss was! In Hardware, Imogene Foss writes that he was “at that time … painting three covers a week”. It’s no shock to learn that he wasn’t reading the tomes that his art was helping to sell. In truth, it’s hard to imagine how he could have possibly found the time to do so.

Anyway, I don’t believe that the mass of readers in the period expected sci-fi covers to accurately represent the contents of the books they were wrapped around. In the case of Foss’ paintings, they were an event in themselves, and the sense of excitement, wonder, and awe that they transmitted was a signifier not of plot or character, but of genre. They were promises concerning what a sci-fi book might mean to the reader on a gloriously visceral level. There was even a strange feeling that each cover belonged to a common, shared universe regardless of the quite separate novels they were attached to. Was there some kind of uber-narrative running, unheralded, through each and every example of his art? It really could seem so, and this could appear to be true even when a Foss cover was wrapped around a non-sci-fi tale such as, to take but one example, Geoffrey Jenkins’ submarine actioneer A Twist Of Sand.

What follows is a selection of Foss’ covers from 1972 books. I’ve used the novels as they saw print rather than hoovering up pristine scans of Foss’ original, and typically quite marvellous, artwork. (I wholeheartedly recommend Hardware for an ample record of Foss’ originals.) We live in an era in which it’s possible to seek out many such glories, but in the 70s, Foss was known, largely, not by his name or his fabulous original canvases, but by the constraints of standard-sized paperback covers that were hemmed in by publisher’s insignias, titles, pull quotes and the likes. Similarly, copies of his covers seen in the wild in 1972 were often markedly well-thumbed, as tended to happen to books stuffed into wire racks and piled up in secondhand shops. What’s below isn’t Foss in all his shiny airbrushed glory then, but rather Foss as might have been encountered in a jumble sale of the period. (And memory insists his art would nearly always be seen there!)

For the wonderful originals, a trip to the Chris Foss site is highly recommended – here.

What follows then, constitutes the results of about three weeks work by Foss in that long-lost year. (The last entry, however, will have taken up considerably more time with all its interior illustrations.) We will, of course, be returning to the cover artistry of Chris Foss, and indeed to that of his peers, in later entries here at The Almanac Of The Fantastical.

And of course, since we’re talking about how Foss was to be found all over the place in 1972, who didn’t try to sneak a peak at his voluminous line drawings for the year’s bestselling Joy Of Sex? Not that the likes of me ever dreamed that Foss-the-future’s-witness was also Foss-the-guru-of-sex, but there he was, everywhere. (Since the first edition of the famed how-to-do-it tome came wrapped in a nervous plain cover, I’ve posted Foss’ 1974 cover below, by which time the book had been so impossibly successful that worries about disapproval and censorship had relaxed a touch.)

The Almanac Of The Fantastical will return tomorrow …