Did You Read the Book?

Add your own!

Good Lord, a spammer in this august establishment! Note that it was wiped out within 20 minutes. (Any former GSS people who are interested in keeping spammers out might like to check out the Spam Fighters group.)

Artists instruction: it's the future! And there are robots!

Looks like a teleportation accident involving a robot and some sort of musical instrument (a heavy metal harp?)

>4 bam2001: I imagine a lot of artists or indeed art editors never read the book and all they were told was what you said.

Noticeably missing: caves. Which are even in the title, FFS.

I suppose we've accumulated enough posts to be worth a spambot (possibly pictured here?).

I'm slowly going through all the photos in the wild that GSS couldn't be arsed to take (or sometimes even acknowledge). Pretty sure I'll come across at least one of these and I promise to post them in this thread.

Ah, Panther books. They must have bought a huge lot of science-fiction-y paintings, and then assigned them at random to books as they published them.

Every once in a while, the illustration would coincide with the book, such as their printing of Asimov's Buy Jupiter, but it wasn't often.

We all remember that scene in the Hobbit with the lion and the emus, right?

>7 bam2001: The Hobbit homes are cute little mushrooms on the hillside though. Somebody was mixing up their fairy tales.

When I was a kid, I read Tolkien in hardcover library editions and the later Ballantine paperbacks with Tolkien watercolors on the covers. When I discovered the original Ballantine cover art, I was appalled. Now I find them sort of charming.

>9 paradoxosalpha: Oh, it definitely is cute, but Tolkien wasn't really pleased:

""I therefore will not enter into a debate about taste - (meaning though I did not say so: horrible colours and foul lettering) - but I must ask this about the vignette: what has it got to do with the story? Where is this place? Why a lion and emus? And what is the thing in the foreground with pink bulbs? I do not understand how anybody who has read the tale (I hope you are one) could think such a picture would please the author."

https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=25810

Yes, my initial dismay was because they were truly unsuited to the texts. But they have their own appeal as a sort of naive, almost psychedelic fairytale art.

Crane-Thing on the Caves of Steel cover looks rather like someone cobbled it together out of bits of machinery found along the roads. I do sorta like the cricket/praying mantis-inspired legs, though.

>11 paradoxosalpha: It's like Grandma Moses on a mild hallucinogen.

I think the pink blobs are some kind of flower bud. The lion and emus (who surely never met in the Third Age!) are inexplicable.

Reading the book that would go with this cover might be interesting.

I read LOTR in the famous 1960s surreal covers. My brother had a poster of all of them put together without text.

@Hammy_JLK: It would be a fine cover for some other robot book, maybe kind of Alien-esque.

Speaking of that, I read today that the latest Alien movie is coming home on the usual formats... and VHS.

>13 GSSex-noob: Time to dig out the ol' Vcr and check it for small animal life!

>14 bam2001: Limited edition; no idea yet how many or at what price.

I checked my VCR about 6 months ago and it still worked fine.