I recently picked up a hardback book that collects a large number of pulp-cover art: Savage Art: 20th Century Genre and the Artists that Defined.It was published in 2010 by Underwood Book and it is tied to Shameless Art: 20th Century Genre and the Artists that Defined It. Underwood may be best known for the Spectrum series collecting contemporary fantasy art.
Edited by Tim Underwood, and Arnie and Cathy Fenner, Savage Art also has a nice introduction by Frank M. Robinson (1926-2014).
The introduction provides a decent overview of pulp history. Robinson was a science-fiction author who wrote intros to a couple of similar books collecting pulp artwork, though his fiction career didn’t start until 1950.
The heart of the book is about 100 pages with images of pulp-magazine covers without the text, one per page. We get the name of the artist, but not the name of the magazine. This is actually a dink on the volume. If we didn’t get it on the bottom of the page, it would have been nice to have gotten some kind of index.
Artwork seems to be limited to science fiction, pulp hero, western, and some spicy pulps.
We get all the major artists represented here: Walter Baumhofer, George Rozen, Earle Begley, Hannes Bok, Rafael de Soto, J. Allen St. John, Virgil Finley, H.J. Ward, Norman Saunders, Frank R. Paul, and several others.
I see covers from Doc Savage, The Shadow, several of the Fiction House science-fiction pulps and more.
The book retails for $35. I didn’t get it at that price and would not have purchased it otherwise. So if you can get it at a decent discount, it may be worth getting it.
