Just a quick post to acknowledge two birthdays today (October 1). J. Allen St. John (1872-1957) and Donal A. Wollheim (1914-1990).
I’ll start with Wollheim. A member of the famed Futurians, Wollheim had his greatest impact as an editor, first at Ace Books and later under his own imprint, DAW. Those yellow spined paperbacks were a sure sign of pulpy goodness. Wollheim also edited the Avon Fantasy Reader, which kept the works of many fo the pulp fantasy authors in front of readers, not the least of which was Robert E. Howard.
J. Allen St. John was an artist who didi many of the classic covers for Weird Tales that weren’t done by Margaret Brundage. Some of his more noted covers illustrated tales from Otis Adelbert Kline and Jack Williamson. Here are some samples of his work.
St. John also appeared in Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures. At the time they (and Weird Tales were published in Chicago, where St. John taught; he ceased appearing in those magazines where they rehomed to New York.
Back in those dear, dead days when hardcover books regularly had illustrations, St, John did dust jackets and interiors for a number of stf and western books. The most famous of those were for the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, both Tarzan and the Mars series.
I miss books with interior illustrations.