Literary Art and Illustration

“Pennsylvania Station from the top of the Hotel New Yorker at 34th and 8th Avenue”

Like all good photographs, this image is more than merely a technically outstanding pictorial record of a place and and a time – though it’s certainly that.

It’s taken for granted that light comes from above.

In this image, light comes from below.

Obviously taken at night, the myriad sources of illumination in the photo arise from “below” – from within Penn Station – through the windows of nearby and distant buildings – from streetlights – and combine to impart a sense of mystery, wonder, and life.

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Here’s a May, 2009, view of the photograph’s vantage point by dave_7 from Lethbridge, Canada: the Wyndham New Yorker Hotel, at 481 Eighth Avenue. Presumably, the photo was taken from one of the structure’s numerous parapets.

Given the location of Penn Station relative to the hotel, I think that that the orientation of the field of view captured in the postcard image corresponds to the triangle in the map below: Given that the the photographer was positioned at the hotel – at the “top” of the triangle – then he was facing south-southeast.

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Photograph by Acme Photo Service, Inc. (dissolved in 1990).

(Image scanned from postcard 2659, published by Underwood Photo Archives in 1992.)

For Your Further distraction…

Pennsylvania Station

Wyndham New Yorker Hotel

Known primarily for his collection of “Venus Equilateral” stories, Golden Age science-fiction writer George O. Smith’s body of work comprised nine novels, many short stories, and, a number of reviews. I’ve only read a few examples of his work, these comprising a few Venus Equilateral tales. To be honest, I found these stories – which I think fall into the continuum of “hard science fiction” – to be straightforward, middling, and serviceable; neither bad nor exceptional. I’m glad I read them, but have no impetus to revisit them for another reading (or two, or three) as for example the stories of A.E. van Vogt (the early van Vogt!), Philip K. Dick, Cordwainer Smith, or Catherine Moore.

Among Smith’s novels was Nomad, which originally appeared as a three-part series in the December, 1944, and January and February 1945 issues of Astounding Science Fiction. For the December issue, William Timmins’ somewhat bland cover art is cast in muted tones of green, gray, and red.

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Paul Orban’s interior illustrations do the story greater artistic justice. Here’s the opening illustration, on page 7. Note how the spacecraft has the general appearance of a submarine (a one-man submarine?!) – down to entry hatch, typical of many such illustrations from the period.

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This illustration of a disintegrating spaceship appears on page 27. The nautical design theme is evident here, also.

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The Nomad series was published in novel form by Prime Press in 1950, in a run of 2,500 copies. The cover illustration is by L. Robert Tschirsky, whose illustrations were featured on (and in) several works of science fiction, fantasy, and pseudoscience (Atlantis and all that) in the late 1940s.