(1923- ) US graphic artist active from the 1940s and responsible for an estimated 6500 book-cover designs (plus some 200 jazz LP covers). Inevitably, with such a huge total of covers, quite a number have been for sf authors, more than fifty of them, some publishing several books with his covers; his first in the genre is probably that for Gunner Cade (1952) by Cyril Judd. He became known for the "Big Book Look", whereby a cover would feature the title and author's name very large, accompanied by a fairly minimalist design element and a small, often stylized graphic. His first cover in this style was that for Meyer Levin's thriller Compulsion (1956). A number of Kurt Vonnegut Jr's later novels benefited from Bacon's covers. As with those novels, Bacon's work in the sf field tended, except in the early days of his career, to be on books at the fringe of the genre whose publishers were planning to market them to the mainstream. But not all: there could hardly be a more genre novel than Colin Wilson's The Space Vampires (1976), whose first US edition (Random House) bears a Bacon cover. Overall, however, while Bacon's influence on book-cover design in general has been enormous, he has impacted the speculative genres only tangentially. [JGr]
Paul Bacon
born Ossining, New York: 25 December 1923
died
works
- The Graphic Art of Paul Bacon with Hank O'Neal and Stanley I Grand (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania: Sordoni Art Gallery, Wilkes University, 1999) [chap: graph: pb/Paul Bacon]
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