A Rose for Ecclesiastes – Literary Art and Illustration

Among the many artists responsible for the vast number of cover and interior illustrations featured in “pulp” science fiction and fantasy of the mid-twentieth century, there are particular individuals whose works – by varying aspects of their unique artistic styles – immediately identify their creators: Among them, Virgil Finlay, Chesley Bonestell, Richard Powers, Hubert Rogers, Kelly Freas. And, Wayne Francis Woodward, who – as an artist and occasional author – went by the name “Hannes Bok”.

Bok’s artistic style – as shown by the cover below, from the November, 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – is characterized far less by intricate detail, depictions of technology, and thematic symbolism, than by a mild but pleasing degree of exaggeration of aspects of the human form (note the large eyes, delicate fingers, and elongated bodies of the four subjects in the painting); variations in the degree of saturation of the same color (or related group of colors); above all, a kind of subtle, vaguely three-dimensional “texture” – a visual texture, that is! – to objects and subjects appearing in the painting.

This cover, an outstanding example of Bok’s work, was published only five months before his death in April of 1964. Notably, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was one of the few (perhaps the only?) pulp science fiction (and fantasy!) literary magazines of its era to feature such wrap-around covers, which are very striking, regardless of the artist. The first such cover (by George Gibbons) appeared in MF&SF of August of 1952, and others appeared once-or-twice-and-sometimes-thrice (!) per year, from 1958 through 1975.

I hope to bring you some of those full-cover-covers, from my own collection, in the future.

Note: I created this image by separately scanning the front and rear covers, and spine (that was tricky) of my copy, and then digitally combining the three scans into one file, using Adobe. No way was I gonna’ take a chance at breaking the binding of such a notable issue!

By way of comparison, the following two images – from Randy Marcy’s collection at Pinterest – show Bok’s art as originally created. First apparent is that the cover art as published was transposed from left to right (or, right to left, if you prefer). This allowed the image of Martian high-priestess (the woman fascinated by the purple rose) to remain completely unobscured as “stand-alone” art on the back cover, while ample “real-estate” on the front cover remained for magazine title, logo, and authors’ names. Second apparent is that the original art (at least, as present on Pinterest) has substantially higher saturation and contrast than the magazine cover as actually published, like Bok’s art on the cover of Volume 1, Number 1, Science Stories.