COVER ART BY:


 


A few pocketbook covers:
These were sold at the same time to the publisher.  Mike Knerr and I contracted for the books at the same time.


The right book is one of mine, the left an assignment dad got from the publisher.

SOME PIKE BOOKS

The cover JULIE was for one of my books, a diary of a young starlette by Hal Lambert (one of many such pennames).  All books I did for Bob Pike were on assignment.  The first was the story that went with the next cover:

The cover to the right was for by book "Lost City of The Damned" by Alec Rivere'; the other "Coming of The Rats" by George H. Smith. The original art for both were, at one time, in my hands. The "Rats" art is for some reason has been asked for many times.  Dad didn't like either of these covers. 

Bob Pike had suggested I cut out the middle man, since I was selling books & covers to him why not just go to the distributor and start packaging books myself.  And so came about
SCORPION BOOKS

Perhaps my favorite, his last cover:

It was a sweet deal, which offered the chance to put together a line of sci-fi books: Powell Sci-Fi.  It was a fun time and nice to get work for my father, too, in his retirement. But he didn't live long enough to do more than three sci-fi covers and I had to turn over the work to Bill Hughes, who was a marvelous artist and a sci-fi fan and was a wiz at cover graphics.  He freelanced for many of the local publishers and was in great demand.  But I had the sci-fi line and he was highly anxious to break into the field!  We worked really very good together.  My only sadness over it was dad's death caused our "kinda" partnership come into being.

 scorpion books