Italian Sci-Fi Book Covers

fucking yes

Prompting many questions:

http://www.mondourania.com/urania/u941-960/u957.jpg

wow

A+

one-armed naked woman with wheelchair-bound boy, what's on your ipod

what do you look like in your undewear

Most of these covers were the work of genius Dutch artist Karel Thole.
He did also the artwork for the first Lovecraft book I bought:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_hh4wCWSJ6w4/SKPWGS9k2HI/AAAAAAAAAvE/A-68NLZLppg/s1600/mostri-angolo-strada-thole-1966.jpg

there are some great crazy non-Italian SF covers on the Ghost Box website: http://www.ghostbox.co.uk/weirdcovers/index.htm

feel like a bummer for saying this cuz the art is way cool but i hate those red circles! and the urania logo at the top! and the red border thing! sorry.

i mean i hate that the art is in a red circle. surrounded by text and stuff.

the older ones don't bug me as much.

http://www.mondourania.com/urania/u321-340/u324.jpg

(could still do without all the border jazz and geometric shapes though.)

"i mean i hate that the art is in a red circle. surrounded by text and stuff"

The red circle was a kind of reference mark to the giallo series also published by Mondadori.
Lovecraft books came without it and were more effective in their craziness.

By the way, inspoired by this thread I went through my Urania collection and discovered that I lost my copy of Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness: this is a bummer! :)

Man, I want a desktop-sized hires scan of that Karel Thole thing. Amazing.

yeah, much gratitude to shakey & marco for the gift of thole. plan now to spend a whole lot of time (and hopefully not money) learning more.

LOVE the covers from #281-335, when the cleaner white-top-border-with-diamond was first introduced, but before the circle business. layout works well with the more surreal/symbolic/graphic turn the art was taking, and it's a nice transition out of the more pulp-traditional covers that came before:

http://www.mondourania.com/urania/u281-300/ul283.jpg

sort of with scott on the big red circle, though. worked very well when first introduced (@ #336), with many/most covers expanding past or otherwise working cleverly with the device's border - but over time, the designers seem to settle for using it merely as a "window" and things get dull. basic design is very strong though, with the color-matching publisher's info diamond and price box on the left, text to the right, big red lucky strike circle offset in the middle. when it's used well, it looks great:

http://www.mondourania.com/urania/u341-360/ul357.jpg

the second major overhaul of the circle design @ #457 finally loses me, and at that point, i'm with scott: just wanna see the paintings.

more Thole on Lovecraft:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_hh4wCWSJ6w4/SKPdp8KHYjI/AAAAAAAAAvg/QrB5tN9f0fg/s320/mostri-angolo-strada-thole-1974.jpg

This truly freaked me out when I was a kid: brain-eating monsters!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_hh4wCWSJ6w4/SKP_urO_jvI/AAAAAAAAAwI/X9hqCExaXyc/s320/tutti-racconti-1990-thole.jpg

Covers aside, Urania was a fantastic series that finally introduced sci-fi in Italy as something deserving literary attention. Translations were mostly good, the editors knew what they were doing and authors like PK Dick were first published in Italy thanks to Urania.
I spent entire summers reading piles of these books (you can still find them for very cheap prices at any self-respecting flea market).

are there any art books/collections of vintage 60s-70s sci fi cover art? Everything I see on amazon came out in the 70s and consists primarily of the artwork of previous eras (Gernsback etc)

I've never seen one, I don't think. Call Borderlands and ask them?

I assume you seen this: http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/

whoa, that's great!

love this ballard:

http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/images/2591_J_G_BALLARD_The_Wind_From_Nowhere_1974.jpg

yeah I've seen the penguin thing

and these sites are great, I'm just kind of surprised this stuff hasn't gotten the coffee-table treatment, there's so much of it

yeah I've seen the penguin thing

and these sites are great, I'm just kind of surprised this stuff hasn't gotten the coffee-table treatment, there's so much of it
--stop swearing and start windmilling (Shakey Mo Collier)

Sci-fi reference books in general are kinda in short supply.

Shakey this is obv what you are looking for:

http://www.amazon.com/Tomorrow-Beyond-Masterpieces-Science-Fiction/dp/0894800558

It looks like they have it at the SFPL Main as a reference book so you can check it out to make sure.