Black Gate

Night Monsters is an interesting case study in book collecting, as least for me.

It was originally published in 1969 as part of an Ace Double set, with a moody but otherwise fairly unremarkable cover by Jack Gaughan (see below). The subtitle Ace put on the collection was “A new collection of the weird, the wonderful, and the macabre,” which was certainly accurate, if a little pedestrian.

I bought a copy 25 years ago. Never read it. It shared a spine with Leiber’s early novel The Green Millennium (here’s John Schoenherr’s cover, just because I have a thing about uploading paperback covers), which I found a little more interesting. To be honest, after a few years I kinda forgot about the book on the back side of The Green Millennium.

Fast forward to early 2013. I’m surfing eBay and I stumble on a copy of Fritz Leiber’s Night Monsters, a Panther paperback published in the UK in 1975. I have no immediate recollection of a Fritz Leiber collection called Night Monsters, but that’s not necessarily a big deal; it could be a re-titled version of one of his collections I do remember.

What is a big deal is that I recognize the cover artist. There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s the work of the great Bruce Pennington, who provided some of the finest covers for Black Gate, for BG 12 and BG 14.

I’m a huge Pennington fan. Part of it is simple gratitude — the man was enormously gracious to me when I called him up in 2007, hoping to buy the rights to two of his paintings. He had no idea who I was, calling him from America with nothing more than high spirits and a meager budget. He very politely asked to see “a copy or two” of my little magazine, before making up his mind.

Twenty-four hours later I had two sample issues in the mail bound for England, with an enthusiastic hand-written note telling Bruce how much I admired his work. About a month later I received a marvelous letter from him, saying he had been very impressed with the issues, and that he would be delighted to provide us the art we wanted — and at the price I had offered.

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The most popular article on the Black Gate website in July was our report on the departure of James Frenkel from Tor Books.

News articles like that are usually good for some decent traffic. It seems everyone had something to say about Frenkel stepping down from his post at the most powerful genre publisher in America and all that attention generated a lot of clicks.

Most conversations, however, dwelled on the circumstances of his departure, and overlooked his many accomplishments. During his years at Tor, Frenkel sure was busy. He acquired and edited some of their most important books, including volumes from Frederik Pohl, Dan Simmons, Jack Williamson, Timothy Zahn, Greg Bear, Andre Norton, Vernor Vinge, and many others.

But even before he joined Tor, Frenkel made major contributions to American SF and fantasy, particularly as publisher at Bluejay Books in the mid-80s. It’s Bluejay, and the beautiful books they produced before going out of business, that I want to talk about today.

Bluejay was active just as I was really discovering American fantasy and SF in the early 80s, haunting bookshops in downtown Ottawa. They were pioneers in the trade paperback market, hired excellent cover artists — including Rowena Morrill, Tom Kidd, Barclay Shaw, John Pierard, Jill Bauman, and others — and published many of the top writers in the field, such as Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Vernor Vinge, and many more.

That was a powerful combination, and it meant that Bluejay was an imprint with enormous prestige — at least in my mind. I kept an eye out for their books on the shelves and always gave them special attention.

That prestige extended to all their titles, not just the authors I recognized (part of the magic of having a strong and easily recognizable visual brand). It also extended to the new authors they discovered and championed.

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