In this 2012 post I talk about an amazing discovery that I made about one of my old book covers.
These days, I get to play the “age card” for all manner of brain farts and such. It comes in pretty handy when I walk into my office and totally forget why I did, or worse, when I leave my car keys in the refrigerator. But since what I’m about to tell you has a shelf life of over three decades, I’m afraid the age card won’t work. What I’ll claim then is that my place of birth—where I was beamed down from a long, long time ago—is the planet Oblivious, a place where I often still reside.
Here’s the deal: in 1978 I published a sword & sorcery novel titled Berbora with a crummy publisher called Manor Books, long since—and thankfully—defunct. As badly as they mangled the editing—and as crappy as my writing was—I always thought that the book had a pretty cool cover, as you can see here. It’s hard to read the artist’s signature, but it looks something like “Hinck.”
Okay, hold that thought for a moment, and let’s talk about Frank Frazetta. The late, great artist (he died in 2010) was renowned for his numerous science fiction and fantasy book covers, including the works of my two favorites, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, as well as for lesser-known writers. Having a Frazetta cover was a badge of honor for any writer in those genres. Despite publishing sixteen novels in fantasy and SF through the early 1990s, I never had the good fortune of a Frazetta cover.
Or so I thought.
A while back, while mucking about on the Internet, I came across a blog post that someone had written about three years earlier. The blogger had found a piece of Frazetta artwork, called “Kubla Khan,” dated 1975, and published by Frazetta in 1977. He put it next to the Berbora cover, and guess what?
Holy crap!
The blogger referred to it as a “blatant rip-off.” I can’t argue that. Knowing my publisher at the time, this kind of thing didn’t surprise me. I’ve since rewritten and reissued Berbora as The Sword of Tyron. As you can see, it has brand-new cover art.
Still, it’s kind of cool having a pseudo-Frazetta cover on one of my old titles, don’t ya know…