7. UK Cover artists - Hardbacks

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On the next pages are short biographies of some of the cover artists.

There is a comprehensive set of books available that anyone wanting detailed information about the artists of all the books and comics should consult.

Edgar Rice Burroughs 100 Year Art Chronology

by Michael Tierney

J Abbey There has been some confusion in regards to Abbey, there were actually two brothers S. Abbey and J. Abbey, their full and real names are Salomon Van Abbe (1883-1955) and Joseph Van Abbe . Their work was often not prefixed by their initial to further confuse things http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/abbey.htm

Studley Oldham Burroughs was ERB's nephew, born December 26, 1892 to brother Harry and his wife Ella (Nellie) Burroughs. He was named after his father whose full name was Henry Studley Burroughs, and his mother whose maiden name was Oldham. Both Studley and his sister, Mary Evelyn (born March 12, 1895) were born in Chicago. Harry and Nellie took both children to Minidoka during the Burroughs brothers gold mining venture. http://www.erbzine.com/mag0/0053.html

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John Coleman (or "Jack") Burroughs was born in Chicago in February 1913, as the youngest son of Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs. John was a talented artist in his own right, and illustrated all his father's novels from 1937 on.

In the 1940s, he illustrated the 'John Carter of Mars' Sunday newspaper strip, as well as a 'David Innes of Pellicudar' comic book feature and numerous Big Little Book covers. His wife, Jane Ralston, assisted him in the artwork and lettering and served as a model for the heroines he drew. In 1967, Ballantine Books published his solo novel 'Treasure of the Black Falcon'.

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Walpole Champneys (1879 to 1961) was an artist, designer and colourist, most significantly of the Art Deco period and was commissioned by notable architects of the day to design interior colour schemes, mural panels and textile hangings for new leisure and entertainment public buildings, including The Regent, Brighton (1921), The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (1932) and Grade II* listed Dreamland Cinema and Sunshine Café (1935) in Margate.

He also illustrated dust Jackets, most notably William J Locke's novel 'The Red Planet'. He created cover designs for several of the early Tarzan books.

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James Allen St. John (October 1, 1872 – May 23, 1957) was an American author, artist and illustrator. He is especially remembered for his illustrations for the novels Burroughs, although he illustrated works of many types. He is considered by many to be 'The Godfather of Modern Fantasy Art'.

St. John's artistic career began in 1898. He studied at the Art Student's League of New York. This was followed by his first commercial relationship with the New York Herald. During this period he spent time in Paris from 1906 to 1908, then moved to Chicago around 1912 and would eventually live at Tree Studios art colony until his death. While in Chicago he became close friends with artist Louis Grell. Here he began his work with the publisher A.C. McClurg & Co., although he had already produced his best-known work for this publisher back in 1905, The Face in the Pool, which he had both written and illustrated.

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G W Goss was born Geoffrey Walter Goss in Battersea, London, on 10 January 1901, the son of Walter Goss (1832-1926), a piano teacher, and his second wife Christine Elizabeth Mary (nee Saunders, 1871-1956). Walter Goss had four children from his first marriage; three years after Arabella Goss died in 1895, her husband, at the age of 65, married 27-year-old Christine and went on to have three more children.To collectors, his name is probably best known for his covers of Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Although not the first British artist to produce covers for Tarzan novels, he was a regular Burroughs' artist for Methuen in the 1920s. He was the first dustjacket artist for only one 1st edition: Tarzan the Terrible in 1921; mostly, he produced dustjackets for reprint editions. his covers including Tarzan of the Apes, The Return of Tarzan, The Son of Tarzan and The Girl from Hollywood.

As well as dustjackets, Goss was also a prolific illustrator of books for children in the 1920s and 1930s. He also provided illustrations to Little Folks, Cassell's Magazine and The Wide World Magazine, and produced a series of humorous postcards featuring cats and dogs.

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Frederick William (Fred) Leist (1873-1945), artist, was born on 21 August 1873 at Surry Hills, Sydney, eighth surviving and fifteenth child of Edward Frederick Leist, builder, and his wife Harriet Eliza, née Norris, both Londoners. Fred was educated at Crown Street Public School and, while training as a furniture designer in the workshops of David Jones Ltd, studied art at Sydney Technical College before becoming a student of the Art Society of New South Wales; under Julian Ashton's tuition he learned plein air techniques. On 29 January 1898 he married Ada Sarah Roberts with Methodist forms.

As a black-and-white artist Leist drew for the Bulletin in the 1890s and became staff artist on the Sydney Mail; he was also local representative for the London Graphic from 1900. According to William Moore he 'was the first to portray the Australian girl as a definite type'. Leist was an original council-member of the Society of Artists, Sydney, in 1895 and, after their merger, of the Royal Art Society of New South Wales. However in 1907 he was one of the twelve who re-established the Society of Artists. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/leist-frederick-william-fred-7166

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George Peace Micklewright was born in 1893 in West Bromwich, Staffordshire, to Richard Henry and Elizabeth Micklewright. , Micklewright, like other unfortunate young British men, was subjected to conscription. In the event the artist, apparently a Quaker, was exempted, like 16,000 other English pacifists over the course of the conflict, from combat service under the conscience clause in the 1916 Conscription Act-- even as English combat deaths mounted to obscene levels that surely had been utterly inconceivable to most people when the war began.

Micklewright, who was 25 years old at the end of the war, was one of the comparatively fortunate ones and lived another 33 years, during which time he established himself as an accomplished book jacket artist, producing over 2000 jackets in those years, seemingly mostly for genre literature: tales of adventure, westerns and mysteries.

To be honest, many of the books Micklewright illustrated are distinguished far more by his vivid jacket art than the writing of the authors, though there are some exceptions, like Pennyworth of Murder and authors such as Fergus Hume, Edgar Rice Burroughs and the distinguished American crime writers Helen McCloy and Lenore Glen Offord.

http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2016/09/a-pennyworth-of-gp-micklewright-and.html

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Patrick J. Monahan was born Patrick John Sullivan on January 4, 1882 in Des Moines, Iowa. His father, Eugene John Sullivan, was born 1850 in Ireland. He was a coal miner. His mother was Mary Maggie Sullivan, born 1858 in Ireland.In 1926 he was listed in a national directory, Advertising Arts & Crafts, as an "Illustrator of Fiction Stories in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey."

His illustrations continued to appear in pulp magazines such as Adventure, Railroad Man's, Air Trails, Sweetheart Stories, Love Story, Cupid's Diary, and Love Romances. https://www.pulpartists.com/Monahan.html

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Frank Earle Schoonover (August 19, 1877 – September 1, 1972) was an American illustrator who worked in Delaware. He was a contributing illustrator to magazines and did more than 5,000 paintings. Schoonover became part of what would be known as the Brandywine School. A prolific contributor to books and magazines during the early twentieth century, the so-called "Golden Age of Illustration", he illustrated stories as diverse as Clarence Mulford's Hopalong Cassidy stories and the Mars series In 1918 and 1919.

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J. H. Hartley was a familiar artist to many readers of boys’ school stories in the 1920s, providing dustjackets to re-issues of novels by P.G. Wodehouse and R.S.Warren Bell, and he was also a noted illustrator of bible stories. Yet his life has always been something of a mystery – he was even overlooked in Brian Doyle’s groundbreaking Who’s Who of Boys’ Writers and Illustrators, published in 1964.

He was born in Leeds on 25 May 1876 and christened James Henry Hartley. His parents were both involved in the cloth/textile trades – in the 1881 census, the family was living at 6 Kennedy Street, Leeds, with James’s father, William Bennett Hartley (born in Leeds in 1845) working as a cloth dresser, and his mother Jessie (born in Edinburgh in 1848) working as a braider. Indeed, James’s working life began in the same trade – in 1888 he was awarded a Day Scholarship by Yorkshire College, Leeds, as a clothworker’s scholar (as reported in the Leeds Times, 6 October 1888), and in the 1891 census he was recorded as a clothier’s office boy, living with his parents at 4 New Lloyd Street, Leeds.

https://bearalley.blogspot.com/2017/07/j-h-hartley.html

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Paul C. Stahr (1883–1953) was an American illustrator who created many posters, book and magazine covers, particularly for Pulps. Stahr was longtime resident of Long Beach, New York. Comfortable with everything from comedy to crime, Stahr had long running associations with the pulps (especially Argosy) and the weekly comics (notably Life); also work for Collier's, Munsey, Saturday Evening Post, Judge, American Magazine, People's Home Journal. Responsible for a number of book covers for authors like Mrs. Wilson Woodrow, W. R Burnett (Little Cesar), Leslie Charteris (The Saint), Abraham Merritt, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

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