Favorite Trek Book Covers of All Time – and Why!
- Thread starter Arpy
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All the James Blish adaptation covers. Frame that shit, it's art.
The Lou Feck cover art for Star Trek 4 was so good that Bantam reused it for The Star Trek Puzzle Manual, and then Scholastic printed it as a poster in 1978. It's an awesome cover!
A few years ago I learned that the Eddie Jones/"S. Fantoni" covers (ST9, ST10, ST11, ST12, New Voyages, New Voyages 2, Planet of Judgment, and Trek to Madworld) were originally done for German translations of the Blish adaptations -- on both paperbacks and "hefte" pulp weeklies. Sometimes they were altered for the US printings, with details repainted, but usually not. That's why the original cover lay-out for Star Trek 10 was so incredibly bad, with the title of the book obscuring the image of the Enterprise! (http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/5/58/STARTREK471974.jpg) Here's what it looked like on the German book: http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/4/4f/NTRPRSXJJP1973.jpg. A much more satisfying layout.
Jones did a bunch of German Star Trek covers that never made it onto American books. Generally, they were illustrations of characters. Bantam, it seems, was only interested in his "hardware" illustrations.
He also did faux-Trek covers for 5 of the Best of Trek volumes in the early '80's, with illustrations of "not the Enterprise." Some of these illustrations later made it onto the covers of genuine Trek books in Europe, which always made me giggle.
Jones was amazingly prolific. He did literally hundreds of covers for the German SF weekly "Terra Astra", and hundreds of others. In fact, his abstract cover for World Without End was originally from a German Damon Knight anthology (selections from his "Orbit" series of anthologies in English).
I'd love a huge coffee table art book of all Jones's Star Trek illustrations.
But picking a favorite, out of thousands of Star Trek book covers over the past 50+ years? Well, if we go worldwide, the Toru Kanamori covers for the Japanese translations of TOS books are stellar, with the cover of Double Human Supokku! (aka Spock Must Die!) being a particular favorite (https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/518KVcdqthL.jpg). So I'll go with that.
I always liked the "Captain's table" covers, "The Quiet Place", "Articles of the Federation", the "Avatar" books, and all the Vanguard covers.
I love how they connect but also they don't.
I’ve loved different covers for different reasons, but the ones that have come back to me most have been those for the Mission Gamma books. Big family portrait, ya know? (Although Thirishar was wronged in this picture 
)
And I just recently discovered the German ones for the Typhon Pact series. Pretty snazzy.
I guess I love seeing new characters especially. The gorgeous cover for Demons of Air and Darkness also comes to mind.
Conversely, covers that didn’t quite work also stuck with me. The text was uninspired but the image haunting on the cover for Stargazer: Oblivion.
I felt somewhat similarly for the one for Do Comets Dream?.
The Empty Chair was a work of art.
…some that come to mind this moment.
)And I just recently discovered the German ones for the Typhon Pact series. Pretty snazzy.
I guess I love seeing new characters especially. The gorgeous cover for Demons of Air and Darkness also comes to mind.
Conversely, covers that didn’t quite work also stuck with me. The text was uninspired but the image haunting on the cover for Stargazer: Oblivion.
I felt somewhat similarly for the one for Do Comets Dream?.
The Empty Chair was a work of art.
…some that come to mind this moment.
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i love the kitsch, pulpyness and font of the Gold Key comics covers.
enjoyed the later covers for the SCE books, also.
Safe! This is purely a discussion of covers and not a judgment of the books beneath them.
This one stuck with me over the years. I think the dual Kirks really got Shatner’s likeness down without being photorealistic.
And if there’s a prize for inverse proportion of quality between the cover and the content, this one wins by a country mile.
This is one of only a handful of covers where I haven't been able to identify the illustrator. Anyone know who did this?
I had forgotten about this one! I loved this cover. I'm not a big fan of any of the floating head covers at all, and this was a nice departure.
I've always loved the cover for Shadows on the Sun. A beautiful cover and I love the book.
What’s memorable about the book? I know it’s one of a few that also tell the final tale of the TOS crew, right?I've always loved the cover for Shadows on the Sun. A beautiful cover and I love the book.
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