One of the important differences between Lord of the Rings and earlier fantasies is in Tolkien’s protagonists. Frodo, Merry, Pippin, and Sam are not high-powered warriors like those in Germanic and Norse legend, exemplified by Lord Juss and Brandoch Daha in E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, which I’m reading now. Neither do they fit the …
Three editions of the trilogy over the years. The top one is the first, unauthorized paperback version. Note that the Nazgul on the cover of The Two Towers is a pegasus and not the reptilian creature that was actually in the book. The artist got other details right, like the black-robed, faceless Nazgul, and others …
Looking through my Pinterest feed for Tolkien images, I found this cover for a French edition of The Hobbit. It looked awfully familiar to me. Then I figured out where I had seen it before. Now, I wish the artist had been just a little more creative and not cribbed what is obvious, particularly as …
This beautiful cover, reminiscent of Chinese jade carvings, was part of a competition by WenJing Publishing to release the trilogy for an Asian market. I like it when the books receive artistic interpretations of the country they are released in.
German edition This German cover of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit changes the title slightly to “The Little Hobbit” and pairs a bloated, toadlike, crazy-eyed Smaug with a tap-dancing Hobbit waving a top hat. The whole is enclosed in a trompe l’oeil frame with a spider crawling on the bottom, which alludes to the dwarves’ misadventures …
Science fiction writer Joan D. Vinge wrote a fairy tale/space opera mashup in the early 1980s called The Snow Queen, which borrowed from the Hans Christian Anderson tale of the same name. Most of the action took place on a frigid water planet named Tiamat, where humans were split into two clans: Summers and Winters. …
On October 6th Little, Brown Books released the 10th Anniversary edition of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, which included a special bonus: the novel rewritten and gender-reversed, with Edward now Edyth, and Bella now Beau. The bonus was born of the author’s desire to show the story as truly universal and that the gender of the protagonists …
The romance covers post got me thinking. How do plain old erotica book covers stack up to the waxed and buff male torso that signifies a hot read? Let’s see. I’m going to start with A. N. Roquelaure’s Sleeping Beauty Trilogy, which is the porniest mainstream book I know, chockablock with kink, and one that …
Put a dollar in my coffee jar for all
the hard work I do at Ko-fi. com!