Two trilogies from Ballantine Books, two sets of triple covers. First, The Lord of the Rings by Barbara Remington.
These covers go back to when LOTR was still seen as a one-of-a-kind thing. Epic fantasy didn’t exist as a genre; there was Tolkien and people knocking off Tolkien, that was it. They are very much what I think of as the covers. Remington says she hadn’t had a chance to read the books when she drew the art or she’d have drawn them differently.
Second, the three Gormenghast novels by Mervyn Peake, with covers by Bob Pepper.
Here’s a better look at the image without the titles.
If you think that looks weird, well so are the books: Titus Groan, Gormenghast — apparently I never blogged about V3, Titus Alone Peake’s wife put together a fourth volume from his notes and the novella Boy in Darkness falls between V1 and V2.
Part of the inspiration for this post was someone on FB saying that after reading LOTR they’d picked up the Peake books as another fantasy trilogy — that must mean a lot like LOTR, right? It must have been a jarring transition.
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