“Don’t judge a book by its cover!”
I dare say that is one of the best-known adages in the English language; yet I admit to doing this all the time — and what’s more, doing it proudly.
After all, it’s not much fun reading ugly books.
What I mean is: A handsome cover can substantially enhance the pleasure of many days spent with a good novel.
Happily, for Boomers like me, the mid-20th century was a golden age for paperback books — and some of that is due to a Central PA artist who is currently being honored at Penn College.
His name was Paul Lehr, and he kept a studio in Orangeville, just north of Bloomsburg. There, Lehr produced both paintings and sculptures with a science-fiction theme; many of these — long unavailable for public viewing — are on display at the college’s Madigan Library through Nov. 22.
While the exhibit features original, stand-alone works, Lehr is best known for hundreds of sci-fi book covers, adorning such stalwarts as H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. The artist also “covered” such second-wave masters as Zelazny, Le Guin, Harrison, Blish, Herbert, Leinster and Dick.
The provenance of paperback cover-art can be tough to determine (after all, most of these artists are never credited either on or in the books themselves); yet my own research suggests that Lehr also did art for a slew of mysteries and thrillers. In fact, while I was digging, I found to my delight that I already owned some of his covers — a set of paperbacks by the terrific British mystery-master Catherine Aird.
In any case, I’ll be speaking at Penn College in honor of the Lehr exhibit, and my topic will be classic science-fiction novels — with the occasional movie thrown in.
(One can’t help wonder, after all, what effect these golden-age SF covers had on the visual scheme in subsequent cinema….)
I’ll lean heavily on Wells — one of my all-time favorites, and the author of over a hundred books. This literary colossus produced, in a mere four years, the first book on an invisible man; the first about a time machine; and the first involving full-scale alien invasion.
Were it not for the slightly earlier Jules Verne — whom, as far as I can tell, Lehr never “covered” — we might be tempted to dub Wells the grandfather of science-fiction; yet he also wrote works of history, satire, biography and political & social commentary — along with dandy comic novels of British middle-class life: Tono-Bungay, Kipps, The History of Mr. Polly and many others.
Yet once we acknowledge the foundations laid by Verne and Wells, it seems indisputable that Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov and Bradbury constitute a tetrarchy of masters to whom every subsequent SF writer owes, shall we say, a galactic debt.
Clarke and Heinlein were experts in hard science, while Asimov roared through numerous genres, producing upwards of 500 books; his famous “three laws of robotics” seem to become more prescient every day.
Bradbury, on the other hand, was more of a mystic, lacing the psyches of adolescent Boomers with hopes, dreams and nightmares that remain ingrained in us to this day.
Yet like Wells, all four of these visionaries were primarily storytellers — always front-lining the human element above gadgetry, jargon and technological flights of fancy.
This was also true of my favorite among the second-generation SF writers who followed: Philip K. Dick, whose landmark Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) also keeps getting more and more relevant — as AI becomes increasingly hard to distinguish from humans.
Dick’s Electric Sheep was the basis for Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking 1982 movie Blade Runner, which in turn generated a dazzling 2017 sequel — along with Amazon’s hot-looking Blade Runner 2099 series, premiering this November.
Located in the third-floor gallery, the Lehr exhibit is free and open to the public. Hours are available at pct.edu/gallery/about#hours.
Lehr’s daughter Diana, who made the exhibit possible, will speak at the college’s Davie Jane Gilmour Center, Room 1056, at 6 p.m. on Oct.1 — following a 5 p.m. reception at the Gallery in Madigan.
My own talk one week later — 6 p.m., third floor Madigan on Oct. 8 — is likewise free and open to the public; but please register for that one at jvbrown.libcal.com.
