From: Jesper Svedberg <jesper.svedberg@mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: Re: (urth) Re: Burns redeems himself
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2000 20:00:59 +0200


> From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Nicholas=20Gevers?= <vermoulian@yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: (urth) Re: Burns redeems himself
> Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2000 23:27:10 -0800 (PST)
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>
> Tastes differ; and compare the Millennium cover art to
> the Sword & Sorcery bilge on the Orb cover!

I won't argue about taste but I just want to say that I'm not Don Maitz'
greatest fan either, his BotNS covers range from good (the two that Orb
uses on the omnibuses) to pretty horrible (the other two), but they're
all technically well crafted and the good ones are IMO atmospherical and
not at all as clichéd as their reputation.
The Millennium cover on the other hand is technically inadequate,
clichéd, totally lacking in atmosphere and plain ugly. (The guys at
Millennium must really have something against Wolfe, the cover of
_The Fifth Head of Cerberus_ is also horrible buyond belief.)
Bruce Pennington's cover art and the art on the Swedish edition by
[Something] Gordon are really good though, and could have been used
instead. (But if I could choose, then I'd hire Jeffrey Jones or Frank
Frazetta to do the covers, both are truly fabulous artists that would
really catch Urth's atmosphere.)

> As for the Millennium text and format: the hardcover
> text they've reprinted is of a much more readable size
> than that of the Orb edition, which was reduced to a
> painfully small dimension to minimise the number of
> pages, I suppose; and the format is B, the one between
> mass market paperback and hardcover. And all the
> Fantasy Masterworks will be in B format: already out
> is TIME AND THE GODS by Lord Dunsany, an omnibus of
> six early collections; and in April there's Eddison's
> THE WORM OUROBOROS and TALES OF THE DYING EARTH by
> Jack Vance, an omnibus of all four Dying Earth volumes.

Mm, format B, my favourite. :)
I really don't have a problem with reading small print, I even like
it of some reason.
The Fantasy Masterworks series looks REALLY interesting, (I'd buy
the entire series if the BotNS cover hadn't been so ugly, I think
I'm going to buy the Orb edition instead :)) all of the books
planned for release so far have been on my to-buy list for ages,
especially Jack Vance's TALES OF THE DYING EARTH, which is almost
as good as Wolfe himself.
Also planned for release so far are _Little, Big_ by John Crowley and
Robert E. Howard's Conan series collected in two volumes, I've also
heard rumors of M. John Harrison's Virconium series.
Other titles that I wouldn't mind seeing would be _The Broken Sword_
by Poul Anderson, something by Avram Davidson (perhaps _The Phoenix
in the Mirror_) and _Nifft the Lean_ by Michael Shea.


  // Jesper Svedberg

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/