Well, that’s serendipity. Phil links to a source of good book illustration, and I just found a source of bad science fiction book covers. Of which there is apparently an inexhaustible supply. Thanks to Loren Eaton of I Saw Lightning Fall for the tip.
I haven’t gone through the entire inventory, so I don’t know if they’ve included a particular cover that even its publisher admitted, in the cold light of the morning after, was probably a mistake:
Wow. That first one is crazy.
I looked at more of them. The one of the centaur with muscle men on his muscled arms was hilariously bad.
Many of the covers are not only tacky but icky, but what strikes me is how they tend to cluster in one cesspool, chronologically. That is, offhand I would guess that most of them, the ones I looked at anyway, were done within, say, eight years either side of 1980. But these are the things one often sees if one checks used SF paperback sections.
I started checking out used pb SF before 1970. Many of the covers I used to see then were pretty bad too, although some were pretty neat. But even the bad ones weren’t so depressingly bad as the ones here.
Compared to a lot of the other Baen books, I think you came off pretty well, Lars. Seriously, some of them are just painful.
I love the art direction on the novel “Written in Time.” A black helicopter vs. a black train at night. How did the director visualize that? “I don’t know, but I know it’d be cool.”
Yeah… my husband and I both read and loved that version of _Erling’s Word_, but the art is pretty terrible. And would you believe that’s the only copy of any of your books in any of the three library systems to which we belong?