Today is Michael Whelan’s birthday.
There are a lot of my favorite books that were graced by a Whelan cover, and I discovered a lot of my favorite books because they had a Whelan cover.
“Michael Whelan is doing the art, it can’t be bad.”
So here’s a gallery of Michael Whelan covers for some of my favorite books. Click on the thumbnail to see the full image..
Karavansara 
1 July 2019 at 04:11
This looks a lot like my own bookshelf did, ha ha! I totally agree with you, there was a time when if a book had a Whelan cover it was very likely good. (Can’t say about newer Whelans, as I stopped buying books in bulk after college). There was a time when my friends and I would play a game of spotting his MW ‘rune’ on the cover, and if we found it, we’d buy it!
Personal favorites with Whelan covers: Morgaine , Faded Sun and Ealdwood series by Cherryh, Galactic Milieu and Pliocene Exile by Julian May, of course the Elric series of Moorcock and ERB’s Barsoom (though I mostly have the Gino Achille cover editions), Snow Queen by Joan Vinge, and the Coldfire Trilogy and In Conquest Born by CS Friedman.
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1 July 2019 at 07:54
Buying books in college was sort of a social activity, wasn’t it?
Afterwards I did not slow down, but my reading choices became a more solitary/individual thing.
And I was absolutely in love with those DAW books paperbacks. The yellow back and the DAW stamp on the cover were another mark of a book that was most likely my kind of book.
And in the gallery above I left out the Tanith Lee books and Volkhavaar in particular, because I wasn’t able to find a good enough image.
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1 July 2019 at 16:26
Yep, it was. Back then the bookstore chains barely imported F&SF. To find good reads we had to haunt 2nd hand booksellers in Chinatown, or even go to the PX market near the Clark air force base where American servicemen would dump the books they weren’t taking home. So we’d often go together.
Alas, the only Tanith Lee book I got with a Whelan cover was Anackire. Got some with the Sanjulian covers, though, and treasured those.
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1 July 2019 at 20:08
Here it was the same – we had an International bookstore, but they sold paperbacks at the price of diamonds.
I was luck when I found a small bookstore specializing in SF & fantasy, and they had a basement full of old paperbacks.
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