For a short time in the early 1970s, BAF released some of the finest high fantasy in the most beautiful covers the genre has ever seen. Here’s my pick of the best.
I don’t read a great deal of high fantasy — Tolkien, Peake, Martin, Moorcock, Wolfe, and so on, plus whatever other notable fantasy was written by science fiction authors. Okay, so maybe I do read a great deal of it, though it’s not my scene. The first novel I ever wrote as a teenager was a three-volume high fantasy trilogy, the book that much later turned into Hemisphere. But I’m no expert on the genre, and today I would find it tedious to have to trawl through yet another Tolkien-alike from the 1970s.
But it’s been a vast market since long before Bilbo and Frodo underwent their odysseys, if only as the preserve of the unreconstructed warrior (Roman most obviously, but with shades of the ape brute with a club in the entrance to his cave) with bulging pecs and tiny loincloth. There’s no doubt that Tolkien uplifted the style in the same way that C.S. Lewis uplifted the children’s version of fantasy. The vast success of The Lord Of The Rings opened a voracious market for the style, and publishers rushed to fill it. Many writers made their names on the boom. We’re still living in its downdraught.
The story is complex in the U.S., where Ballantine gained the official rights to the trilogy in the 1960s but competitor Ace put out a cheap gray market volume that leapt off the bookstore shelves more profusely than fleas off Conan’s codpiece. As well as Ace, other paperback publishers such as DAW and Lancer scrambled for pickings, and it was no surprise that Ballantine did the same.
Enter Linwood Vrooman Carter, a prolific fantasy writer who had interested Ballantine in a book called Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord Of The Rings in 1969. It was a lovely volume, framed in a colorful, mock-medieval design of heraldic beasts, castles, and verdant foliage.
Moreover, Carter — whose churned-out fiction to date had included a bunch of science fiction novels (including The Man Without A Planet and The Star Magicians in 1966 and Destination: Saturn in 1967) as well as a huge number of volumes in collaboration with Robert E. Howard for the Conan and Kull Of Valusia franchises, and even his own Thongor cycle, making him, essentially, the U.S. equivalent of Michael Moorcock at this time — was knowledgeable and enthusiastic. The publisher gave him his own imprint, and Carter set to work assembling Ballantine Adult Fantasy as his calling card and empire.
Between 1969 and 1974, Lin Carter’s BAF released about 70 paperbacks, a motley collection of old favorites, the unfairly obscure vintage of the scene, new works by budding fantasists, and a clutch of anthologies and introductions. Though BAF couldn’t have Tolkien itself, it did score something of a scoop with Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books, arguably the greater achievement. Carter wrote a preface for each volume that set the work in its proper context, and wrapped them in stunning covers, many with a purposeful mediaeval feel and all distinguished by BAF’s iconic unicorn logo. (There are actually two versions of the unicorn logo: the list below concentrates only on the second.)
At a time when most fantasy was juvenile to say the least, given bulging muscle-men heroes barely distinguishable from those of comic books, this was significantly different. It certainly made the genre far more attractive to readers who would never have picked up a sword-and-sandals novel in their usual homoerotic iconography.
Still, how “adult” BAF actually was is open to debate, and it’s something to contemplate when you scroll through the covers below. “Adult fantasy” implies a certain market, but that marketing may actually be a sneaky indicator to the brighter kids in the class that these are not just more children’s books. In other words, for “adult” read “teenager.” There’s certainly a sense in many of these covers that the target is not actually adults at all. They can be somber and mature, but they can also be cartoonish and silly. At their most attractive and colorful, they seem purposefully designed to slot into middle school libraries.
I think Carter worked hard to try to bring the two scenes together, but never really achieved it. His own remit eventually expanded to actual juvenile novels — what we now market as “young adult” — such as those by Joy Chant. Those who looked to BAF for the more sophisticated end of the genre needed to pick their way through the titles wisely.
Prolific though it may be, the imprint lasted just five years. The fantasy boom passed, and by the mid-1970s the market in speculative fiction was heading for a bust. Science fiction would be its savior, at least in the short term. Though science fiction itself had become ever more intellectual (read: poor selling) in the wake of the new wave, Star Wars in 1977 breathed new life into the pulp style and gave kids something new to playact: fantasy warriors essentially, but with light sabers instead of swords.
Meanwhile a new generation of high fantasy writers, inspired by the Tolkien boom, would supersede science fiction as the speculative genre success of the 1980s and beyond. Hollywood understood what was happening in Star Wars even if the new-school science fiction fans seemingly did not. (They thought Star Wars was an idiot degradation of their genre. In fact it was fantasy in different clothes.) Star Wars in turn inspired a legion of fantasy movies culminating in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pec-perfect role in Conan The Barbarian in 1982. Forget Princess Leia’s incestuous kiss. (That made her your fantasy sister, right?) Here were girls you could really go for, squeezed pneumatically into leather slips. Sex and swords have sold ever since.
Toward the end of its life, BAF become patchier, and Carter was already looking elsewhere. He had become a notable anthologizer, beginning with the Flashing Swords! books in 1973. When the World Fantasy Convention handed out its first Howard awards in 1975, Carter finally got his recognition. He went on to helm the annual anthology The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories beginning in 1975. Ballantine was folded into the Random House empire, and Carter did not follow. The fantasy catalog he’d assembled was passed over to Lester Del Rey, who created his own self-named imprint. Del Rey became an important publisher both of science fiction and fantasy, but the days of Ballantine’s beautiful covers were gone. As early as 1977 the hunks in loincloths were back.
Still, let’s celebrate the experiment while it lasted. Below are my favorite 50 covers of the imprint. I don’t have much to say about them, so feast instead on the wonder and sumptuousness of the art and the miniature treasures of their design. Many of the covers were wraparound, and in multi-volume sets the covers would often line up into a panorama. The list is in alphabetical order of author (with multi-author and anthologies at the end).
And to leave you on a poignant note: low-run special edition books may always be with us, but in the age of the ebook you can be certain a mass-market phenomenon as rich and important as BAF is never coming back. Let’s just hope that future cultural historians discover them and revere them as much as I do.
Hrolf Kraki’s Saga by Poul Anderson
Illustration by Bob Pepper
This 1973 paperback was its first release…
The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson
Illustration by George Barr
…whereas this was an older Anderson novel, first published in 1954. Barr’s image is adept, though the comical background figures might have turned off all but the committed.
Orlando Furioso Volume 1: The Ring Of Angelica by Ludovico Ariosto
Illustration by David Johnston
Surely veering more toward Carter’s didactic end of the fantasy spectrum, this is a prose adaptation of Ariosto’s 1516 poem. Teens can probably skip it.
Beyond The Golden Stair by Hannes Bok
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
A version of the novel was first published in Startling Stories in 1948. This was its first paperback edition.
The Sorcerer’s Ship by Hannes Bok
Illustration by Ray Cruz
This novel first appeared in Unknown Worlds in 1942.
Kai Lung’s Golden Hours by Ernest Bramah
Illustration by Ian Miller
Not a novel but a collection of stories from Bramah’s “Kai Lung” sequence set in an outsider’s vision of courtly China. Bramah was actually a British humorist who began writing Kai Lung stories in 1900.
Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat by Ernest Bramah
Illustration by Ian Miller
One of the last books BAF published in 1974. This one actually is a novel, first published in 1928.
Domnei by James Branch Cabell
Illustration by Brian Froud
The book packages together two “comedies of woman-worship”: Domnei (1913) and The Music From Behind The Moon (1926), parts of Cabell’s enormous sequence Biography Of The Life Of Manuel. Carter was a huge fan of Cabell, but this is another one that kids might find insufferable.
Something About Eve: A Comedy Of Fig-Leaves by James Branch Cabell
Illustration by Bob Pepper
This earlier BAF release is actually another excerpt from Biography Of The Life Of Manuel. It was first published in 1927. That subtitle was never going to attract a crowd, so it was wisely dropped from the cover.
The Cream Of The Jest by James Branch Cabell
Illustration by Brian Froud
Another packaging of excerpts from Biography Of The Life Of Manuel. This one contains two “comedies of evasion”: The Cream Of The Jest (1917) and The Lineage Of Lichfield (1922).
The High Place by James Branch Cabell
Illustration by Frank C. Papé
Papé’s cover seems to me much more in keeping with the tenor of Cabell’s work, which is a 1923 novel once more from the sequence Biography Of The Life Of Manuel.
Red Moon And Black Mountain by Joy Chant
Illustration by Ian Millar
BAF published this novel twice, in 1971 and 1973, with different covers. This is the second version. It was the first in Chant’s four-volume sequence House Of Kendreth and was first published in the UK in 1970 by George Allen & Unwin, the publisher closely related to Tolkien. Unwin, incidentally, would produce their own fantasy imprint Unicorn in 1982 with (surprise, surprise) a logo very similar to BAF’s.
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
Chesterton’s “nightmare” had been first published in 1908. It may be a first rate thriller, but it hardly counts as fantasy.
Khaled: A Tale Of Arabia by F. Marion Crawford
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
One of the earliest of the BAF reprints, this novel was first published in 1891. The cover doesn’t really alert you that you’re getting a sort of Americanized version of The Thousand And One Nights.
At The Edge Of The World by Lord Dunsany
Illustration by Ray Cruz
Not just alphabetically the first, but chronologically the first of a catalog of Edward Plunkett volumes compiled by Carter, who was a huge fan of the man’s work. This one contains a large number of stories published between 1906 and 1914, including ‘The Long Porter’s Tale’ which, under the title ‘A Day At The Edge Of The World,’ gives the book its name.
Beyond The Fields We Know by Lord Dunsany
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
This is an even more substantial catalog of stories published between 1905 and 1914, most of them exceedingly short.
Don Rodriguez: Chronicles Of Shadow Valley by Lord Dunsany
Illustration by Bob Pepper
A novel for a change, first published in 1922.
Over The Hills And Far Away by Lord Dunsany
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
Clearly Carter was on a roll with his invented Lord Dunsany titles by the time of this, the last BAF release. Here are more stories, first published between 1906 and 1947.
The Charwoman’s Shadow by Lord Dunsany
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
And here’s a 1926 novel decked out winningly (not to say winsomely) by Gallardo.
The People Of The Mist by H. Rider Haggard
Illustration by Dean Ellis
Another of the last BAF releases and another of the earliest novels, first published by the magazine Tit-Bits in 1893. You wouldn’t think Carter would fixate on this rather than King Solomon’s Mines or She, but I guess those were taken. Let’s also suppose a little license was used in its cover, which evokes more South America than Africa.
The Boats Of The Glen Carrig by William Hope Hodgson
Illustration by Robert LoGrippo
William Hope Hodgson has never looked better than in LoGrippo’s marvelous Bruegel/Bosch paintings, complete with fake crackle. The novel was first published in 1907.
The Night Land: Volume II by William Hope Hodgson
Illustration by Robert LoGrippo
The more striking frame of LoGrippo’s panorama for The Night Land which BAF published in two volumes in 1972. The same wraparound image was used on both, only reversed for this second volume. The original novel The Night Land was first published as one volume in 1912. It seems that Carter took a few liberties with the text, too.
The Lost Continent by C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne
Illustration by Dean Ellis
Ellis’s cover does pretty much what you’d want a high fantasy illustration to do, pleasingly downgrading the naked warrior and delectable queen for some implausible but stunning golden architecture — as well as a mysterious temple and an exploding volcano. Can you tell, even without reading the 1899 novel (first published in Pearson’s Magazine), that he’s a pawn in her game? Her name is Phorenice, which actually isn’t that of a character in a Carry On movie but, as it turns out, the bane of Atlantis. A shame as much care wasn’t taken on the author’s name here, which is defiantly spelled wrong.
The Deryni Chronicle Volume III: High Deryni by Katherine Kurtz
Illustration by Alan Mardon
BAF had championed Kurtz’s sequence since Deryni Rising, its 19th release, first published in 1970. The second, in 1972, was Deryni Checkmate and this was the third from 1973. I’m guessing it was something of a success since the original trilogy has gone through numerous pressings and she has written innumerable further installments, even if I can’t now pronounce the name (actually a type of elf) without thinking of Daenerys.
Excalibur by Sanders Anne Laubenthal
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
Another new novel, this was its first release (in 1973). The book transposes the legend of King Arthur to Mobile, Alabama because, you know, Laubenthal lived there or whatever.
A Voyage To Arcturus by David Lindsay
Illustration by Bob Pepper
Not considered by Carter one of the BAF releases he numbered in his overview Imaginary Worlds, perhaps because he didn’t write the introduction. (Those numbers are retrospective: the original books did not have them.) A Voyage To Arcturus, first published in 1920, is one of those books that slot equally well into fantasy and science fiction. Ballentine had first published it in 1968, ahead of Carter’s involvement.
The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
It’s pleasing that Lovecraft featured in the imprint, even if the cover isn’t quite the way we remember him. This volume contains the title novel (from 1943) and other shorts from 1919 to 1934.
Evenor by George MacDonald
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
Three very early short novels are featured here: The Wise Woman (1875), The Carasoyn (1871) and The Golden Key (1867). Gallardo wraps these founding modern fairy tales in a simply beautiful cover…
Phantastes by George MacDonald
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
..but does significantly less well with this novel, first published in 1858.
The Three Impostors by Arthur Machen
Illustration by Robert LoGrippo
The instantly recognizable LoGrippo style here classily packages a novel from 1895, which as you’d expect from the writer is more pagan horror than high fantasy.
Lud-In-The-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
Mirrlees’s novel was first published in 1926.
The Sundering Flood by William Morris
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
It was satisfying that BAF found room in its catalog for so many of William Morris’s all but forgotten fantasy novels. Carter saw him, correctly, as the origin of the entire genre, and devoted a great deal of space in Imaginary Worlds to him. This was Morris’s final work, published posthumously in 1897.
The Water Of The Wondrous Isles by William Morris
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
Another posthumous late Morris novel, first published in 1897.
The Well At The World’s End Volume I by William Morris
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
BAF split this 1896 novel in half, and published it in a panoramic cover: this wraparound front forms the back of the second volume, creating a triptych cover when unfolded and placed together.
The Wood Beyond The World by William Morris
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
The third volume published by the BAF imprint lays claim to being “the first great fantasy novel ever written” — true, but Morris actually thought of his literature, like much of his art and design, as a return to mediaeval styles. It’s certainly among the earliest works in the series, having been first published in 1894.
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Illustration by Bob Pepper
Fantasy’s perennially overlooked classic, Peake’s first two books in his Gormenghast sequence are as impossible to illustrate as they are to describe (or, for that matter, to film adequately). They don’t even have an overarching title, here called The Gormenghast Trilogy though when I first bought them as one volume on Penguin they were known as The Titus Books. BAF published all three, in matching Pepper covers: this (first published in 1946), Gormenghast (1950), and the difficult, almost Moorcockian Titus Alone (1959). They’re towering achievements, enthralling and infuriating in equal measure.
Poseidonis by Clark Ashton Smith
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
A collection of short stories and poems first published between 1922 and 1953.
Xiccarph by Clark Ashton Smith
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
More poems and short stories, these spanning the years 1917 to 1935…
Zothique by Clark Ashton Smith
Illustration by George Barr
…and still more, scattered between 1933 and 1951.
The Children Of Llyr by Evangeline Walton
Illustration by David Johnston
A wonderful cover uplifts the second volume in U.S. writer Walton’s reimaginings of the Welsh folk sequence The Mabinogi, two other installments of which I highlight in this list. Cultural appropriation or not, Walton had little success with her series on publishing the first volume The Virgin And The Swine in 1936 (maybe the title had something to do with it?), and it wasn’t until BAF that the others saw a paperback release.
The Island Of The Mighty by Evangeline Walton
Illustration by Bob Pepper
In tiny letters on the cover, BAF admits that this is The Virgin And The Swine given a somewhat more marketable name. No swine is visible in Pepper’s front cover painting.
The Song Of Rhiannon by Evangeline Walton
Illustration by David Johnston
The third installment in the Mabinogi sequence. BAF did not publish the remaining work, Prince Of Annwn, which first found a paperback as a post-Carter Ballantine book in 1974.
Double Phoenix by Edmund Cooper and Roger Lancelyn Green
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
The first of the anthologies and multi-author works that complete this list is a stunning 1971 Gallardo package consisting of Cooper’s newly written novella The Firebird and Green’s From The World’s End (1948).
The World’s Desire by H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
Illustration by Mati Klarwein
More stunning still is this reinvention of the iconography of classic high fantasy that packages an 1890 collaborative novel. Klarwein is better known for his astonishing covers to the LPs Bitches Brew and Live-Evil by Miles Davis and Abraxas by Santana.
The Spawn Of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft and others
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
Gallardo’s work drifts toward the comical that infected the least impressive of the BAF catalog, most of which I excluded from this list. But there’s much to enjoy, in particular the suggestive plant and cuddlesome crab. One Lovecraft novella The Whisperer In Darkness (1931) is included, as well as stories and poems by Ambrose Bierce, Robert W. Chambers, August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, and others. Even Carter himself adds a poem, placing himself among dream company.
Land Of Unreason by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague De Camp
Illustration by Donna Violetti
A collaborative novel from 1942.
Discoveries In Fantasy
Illustration by Peter Le Vasseur
A ragbag of early fantasy stories by Ernest Bramah, Richard Garnett, Donald Corley, and Eden Phillpotts, the most recent of which is from 1931.
Great Short Novels Of Adult Fantasy Volume II
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
The better packaged of the two volumes in this short sequence, though it does veer on the childish. The featured novellas are The Woman In The Mirror (1858) by George MacDonald, The Repairer Of Reputations (1895) by Robert W. Chambers, The Transmutation Of Ling (1900) by Ernest Bramah, and The Lavender Dragon (1923) by Eden Phillpotts.
Imaginary Worlds: The Art Of Fantasy
Illustration by Gervasio Gallardo
If there’s one absolutely essential volume from the BAF series, it’s this critical overview of the subject by Lin Carter himself. As well as an introduction to what Carter considers the history and development of high fantasy and its best practices, it also functions as an overview of BAF, and even includes a numbered checklist of all the other volumes to date. Carter is somewhat opinionated (he doesn’t actually seem to like Tolkien much) but his enthusiasm is infectious, and I treasure my copy of this paperback more than almost anything else in my collection. It’s lovely and it’s highly readable. Near perfect I reckon.
New Worlds For Old
Illustration by David Johnson
Alphabetically, my list ends with another ragbag of poems and stories ranging from 1894 to 1971 including work by Edgar Allan Poe, George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde, Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and Mervyn Peake. No author gets more than one bite of the apple except Carter himself, who for the second time anthologizes his own work into the flow of high fantasy with two stories intended seemingly to prove that we had here reached the pinnacle of the style.
Almost all these covers were borrowed from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. I’ve color corrected, cropped, and otherwise messed with the images, so please go to the ISFDB for the originals if you want to reproduce them.
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