Pepper, Bob
Entry updated 1 June 2026. Tagged: Artist.
(1938-2019) US artist and illustrator, who also signed his work as Robert Pepper. He studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California before moving to New York in the 1960s to work as a commercial artist. After working on several record album covers, his first fantasy book cover was for a Dell compilation of Saki's work titled Incredible Tales (coll 1966), but his most significant early work was with Ballantine Books in what became their Adult Fantasy series of reprints. A triptych provided covers for all three volumes of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy (1968) [all dates below not given in boldface refer to date of reprint]. Later volumes included David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1968); James Branch Cabell's Figures of Earth, The Silver Stallion (both 1969), and Something about Eve (1971); Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter (1969) and Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley (1971) and Evangeline Walton's The Island of the Mighty (1970). He also provided first edition covers for Katherine Kurtz's Deryni Rising (1970) and Deryni Checkmate (1972), for Joy Chant's Red Moon and Black Mountain (1971), and for Poul Anderson's Hrolf Kraki's Saga (1973). His distinctive use of wraparound covers became a familiar feature of the series.
As with the Ballantine covers, most of Pepper's subsequent work appeared on paperback reprints, covering a wide variety of authors. In 1971-1972, for six reprints of Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr series of juvenile novels, he provided stylized, almost psychedelic covers which, while thematically unified, barely reflected the comparatively innocent Asimov texts. Later, Pepper provided both cover and playing card designs for two Milton Bradley Card Games in 1981, Dark Tower and Dragonmaster, which would be his only venture into the world of gaming.
More attuned to Pepper's sensibilities, perhaps, was a series of six covers for the DAW Books reprints of Philip K Dick novels in 1983-1984. He had earlier painted covers for reprint editions of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (New American Library, 1971) and Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (Ace, 1976), but the DAW series was thematically unified in a style far removed from those of his earlier Ballantine work, sometimes wryly alluding to the novel's central themes, as with We Can Build You and Ubik (both 1983), and characteristically featuring a stylized head in the centre of the frame, often with various cables or implements seeming to connect them with something out of frame entirely. These included The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1983), A Maze of Death (1983), the Roger Zelazny collaboration Deus Irae (1983), and A Scanner Darkly (1984). These would be Pepper's last sf book covers, although he continued active in children's books and other venues for several years, at one point indicating that his "semi-retirement" may have been in part due to the increasing use of digital art in publishing. [GKW]
Robert Ronald Pepper
born Portsmouth, New Hampshire: 23 October 1938
died New York: 16 January 2019
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