Milton Luros was born in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating high school, he attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn where he studied commercial illustration. By 1937, he was freelance artist whose work appeared on the covers of magazines like Crack Detective, True Gangsters, and Western Aces. In the 1950s, Luros wrote and drew a nationally syndicated comic strip called Roger Lincoln, S-Man. Later in his career, Luros worked as both an agent and a publisher.
Louis Marchetti was born in Fondi, Italy and immigrated to the United States at an early age. He studied art for five years at the Art Students League of New York. As a freelance illustrator, he created numerous paperback book covers for Dell Books, Pocket Books, Lancer Books, Paperback Library, and Popular Library.
A selection of his work can be found below.
Jerzy Zielezinski was 25 years old when the Nazis invaded his native Poland. He was sent to first the Warsaw Ghetto and eventually to the Dachau Concentration Camp. Zielezinski escaped the horrors of his everyday life through his art. Paper and pencils were forbidden so Zielezinski sketched using scraps and pieces of charcoal. After the liberation of Dachau, Zielzinski turned his rough sketches into drawings. His first two books of drawings, Prisoner Album (1945) and 24 Sketches From The Concentration Camps in Germany (1946), are considered to be invaluable pieces of history. His artwork is displayed at Holocaust memorials across Europe.
After World War II, Zielzinski moved to New York City and, using the name George Ziel, he started his prolific career as a commercial artist. Ziel painted a countless amount of paperback novel covers. He is best remembered for his Gothic Romance covers.
A selection of his work can be found below.
Boris Grinsson was born in Pskov, Russia. His family fled to Estonia after the Bolshevik Revolution and Grinsson studied art in Tartu. Grinsson began his career designing film posters in Berlin. After drawing an anti-Nazi political poster, he fled to Paris. Over the next few decades, Grinsson designed a countless number of French film posters.
A selection of his work can be found below.
Mitchell Hooks was born in 1923 and studied graphic design at the CAS Technical High School in Detroit. After graduation, he briefly worked for GM and served in the U.S. Army. After he was discharged from the military, Hooks moved to New York City and worked as a freelance artist. Along with painting countless paperback covers, Hooks also designed several film posters. He is best known for designing the poster for the first James Bond film, Dr. No. Hooks also illustrated How To Respect and Display Our Flag for the Marine Corps.
Below is a selection of Hooks’s work.
Considered by many to be the best artist currently working in the horror field, Texas-born Alex McVey is an award-winning illustrator whose work has ranged from album art to graphic design to book illustration. He has illustrated the works of several horror writers, including Stephen King.
Born to a Greek family living in Egypt, Basil Gogos immigrated to the United States at the age of 16. Gogos was interested in art from a young age and studied at several New York city art schools. Gogos began his professional career in 1959 and found his greatest success painting covers for The Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. In the 1970s, Gogos retired from commercial art and devoted himself to doing fine art. In 2006, Gogos received the Monster Kid Hall Of Fame Award at The Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards.
Born and raised in New York City, Eric Stanton was 12 years old when he was quarantined because of Scarlet Fever. During this time, he started to draw out of boredom. After a stint in the Navy, Stanton attended the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and found work as a freelance artist. Between 1963 and 1966, Stanton painted over a 100 paperback book covers. His covers typically featured strong women dominating weak men.
Below are a few examples of Stanton’s work as a paperback cover artist.
A Chicago native, Harold McCauley trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the American Academy of Art. From 1939 until 1942, he worked at Haddon Sundbloom’s busy Chicago art studio and posed for the original painting of the Quaker Oats Man. Starting in 1946, McCauley worked as a staff artist for the Ziff-Davis publishing house and painted over a hundred covers for magazines like Amazing, Fantastic Adventures, and Mammoth Detective. Duringthe early 1960s, he also painted several covers for Nightstand Library.
William Luberoff had no formal training but he was one of the most prolific illustrators of the pulp era. He began his career doing covers and illustrations for magazines such as Climax, Secret Agent X, and Saga and he also designed over 60 cover for Columbia, one of America’s top Catholic-interest magazines. He retired from the magazine market in the 1960s and devoted himself to doing religious paintings. While I was researching him for this post, I came across many of his paintings that I remembered first seeing in catechism class. Luberoff’s painting Baseball can be seen in the Baseball Hall Of Fame.
Through the Shattered Lens 