Signature Art

Marilyn Dahl at Shelf Awareness reminisces about Leo and Diane Dillon’s Ace Specials book covers:

I began with Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness–I was not a science fiction fan, but I couldn’t resist the cover. And then Keith Roberts’s masterwork Pavane (just reissued by Old Earth Books with the same cover), Harlan Ellison, Joan Vinge, Roger Zelazny–drawn in by the Dillons’ art, I explored science fiction. I also embarked on collecting picture books, with the Dillons making up a major percentage or my purchases.

Dahl’s passing reference to Old Earth Books is quite enough reason to mention this post, don’t you agree, Michael Walsh?

Asher and Walsh Recognized by WFC

Michael Swanwick’s Flogging Babel posted a photo of World Fantasy Award winners Ellen Asher and Michael Walsh and these very nice compliments:

Two of those good people are shown above: Michael Walsh, of Old Earth Books, for Old Earth Books and especially for publishing Howard Waldrop, and Ellen Asher, who received a lifetime achievement award for her career at the Science Fiction Book Club. They are Heroes of Literature, the both of them.

Walsh copied the news to me in an e-mail titled “What happens to past worldcon chairs…” I hope Christian McGuire is reading — he’s always happy to hear we can go back to being useful members of society.

(The entire list of SFC Award winners is here.)

The Perspicacious Post

Michael Walsh’s Old Earth Books has received another hat tip from the Washington Post’s Michael Dirda for its Howard Waldrop collection:

Old Earth Books (Baltimore). Other Worlds, Better Lives: A Howard Waldrop Reader, Selected Long Fiction, 1989-2003 is a companion to Waldrop’s selected short stories, Things Will Never Be the Same, a volume justly praised by a certain Washington Post reviewer of admirable perspicacity (me). Waldrop parodies and pastiches popular culture and literary tradition with seriously manic brilliance. See, in this volume, his novella-length retelling of the labors of Hercules in 1920s Mississippi, “A Dozen Tough Jobs.”