Book on the Wall

By Cheryl Morgan

As you may have guessed, I’m rather fond of books. I’m not by any means a collector, but I try to treat my books well. I don’t write in them, I don’t dog-ear them, and even when I use Post-Its to mark passages I want to refer back to in a review I make sure I take them out once it is written. Here, however, I have a book that I’m very tempted to cut up. Why, because it is full of gorgeous John Picacio art and I’d love to be able to have some of it on my walls.

Thankfully I do have a small amount of self-restraint. In any case, some of my favorite Picacio works, in particular the cover for The Empire of Ice Cream, are warp-arounds and cover two pages of the book so they’d be hard to extract.

Enough frothing, however. Regular readers will know how much I like Picacio’s work. I was delighted to see him win a World Fantasy Award last year, and I’m even more delighted to see him on the Hugo ballot. He is very, very good. But what about the book: Cover Story: The Art of John Piacio.

You might wonder about an art book coming from a small press, but the folks at Monkey Brain have done a fabulous job here. This is no cheap trade paperback, it is a big, solid, beautifully produced hardcover. It is the sort of book you should be proud to have on your coffee table, and it very much deserved the exquisite care that Picacio took in packaging it up to send it to me.

The text content of art books is obviously of less interest than the pictures, but I did learn a fair amount about Picacio. I had no idea, for example, that he got his first big break by being asked to provide a cover and illustrations for the 30^th anniversary edition of Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man. He also provided the cover for the 35^th anniversary edition of Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, a job he got simply by handing Ellison a sample of his work at a convention. Harlan isn’t easily impressed, but on the basis of some chutzpah and one poster he decided that Picacio was someone he wanted to work with.

Really, of course, you don’t want a John Picacio art book; you want John Picacio prints, or better still originals. But we can’t all afford that, and we certainly can’t afford quite so many wonderful pictures as this book contains. Just buy it, OK?