Behold the mighty works of Lee Brown Coye, born today in Syracuse, NY, in 1907. A self-taught artist and illustrator, Coye's cover art for many Arkham House hardcover editions is well-known and loved. Years later he would illustrate covers for Stuart David Schiff's Whispers magazine, and was even the inspiration for Karl Edward Wagner's classic 1974 short story "Sticks."
5 comments:
Cool post ! Those Lovecraft Arkham House books with the Coye covers were were my first introduction to H.P. Our local library had them and I would ride bike up there when I was about 11/12 years old and borrow them constantly. I use to stare at that those covers for what seemed like hours. Eventually I saved up my allowance and bought the Bantam pocket book editions with the weird heads. Thanks for the great post !
Dick
Love Coye's art, especially the Wellman and Blackwood covers.
The incident that was the inspiration for 'Sticks' is very interesting, and quite creepy.
Glad to see the love for his work. The covers for Arkham house is what drew my ten year old self to the works of Lovecraft and for that I am forever grateful.
His drawings were also those that illustrated the famoius Arkham Dereleth ed. collections like Sleep No More, Dark Things, and Who Knocks?, etc. I cut my teeth on those yellowed tomes that I'd found in my hometown library as a kid.
And I could kick myself for not grabbing that same copy of Murgustrum that I saw in a used book store some years back. I kept meaning to go back for it ,but...somehow never did. I mean that is one Helluva cover!
This ancient blog post credits Coye with work by other great artists, via:
o The Mask of Cthulhu (Robert Taylor)
o Witch House (Ronald Clyne)
o The Doll (Ronald Clyne)
For Arkham Coye did also HPL's Three Tales of Horror.
Cheers,
B.
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