Favorite Editions

I'm still mining the content I wrote for other places -- in my case, mostly Usenet and bulletin boards -- in the last decade or so, and dragging it over here so that Antick Musings will be the Grand Unified Depository of all thing Andrew Wheelerish. This little squib, which most people would consider a bit of string too small to save, was originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 11/1/00, and was part of a longer discussion about the topic clearly stated in the title:


The big one for me was the late '70s Avon editions of Zelazny's books (especially the Amber series) with those mostly-black covers and the great small illustrations by Ron Walotsky. There was something that just said to me: this is what a Zelazny book looks like.

I actually imprinted so hard that, years later, when I was doing a one-volume edition of "The First Chronicles of Amber," I made my art director use Walotsky for the cover and replicate that same look as much as possible. Hey, it may not be the reason most people go into publishing, but...