Jack Vance's Dying Earth: A Gallery
Jack Vance was born on this date in 1916. Despite Vance being one of my favorite authors, he’s been woefully underrepresented on the DMR Blog. Time is short right now, but I’m not going to neglect the 105th anniversary of his birth. While I won’t be able to write a fitting tribute to the man, instead I’ll present a collection of different covers of my favorite of his books, The Dying Earth. Besides, a picture’s worth a thousand words, right?
The very first edition of The Dying Earth was a paperback published in 1950 by Hillman Periodicals, with a cover price of only a quarter. If you want a copy these days, it’ll set you back quite a bit more than that!
After several years out of print, The Dying Earth returned in 1962 as part of Lancer’s Science Fiction Library. The cover art on this edition is by Ed Emshwiller.
In 1976 Underwood-Miller brought out a limited hardcover edition with a wraparound cover by George Barr.
The 1977 edition from Pocket Books, with cover art by the Brothers Hildebrandt.
The 1982 edition, which was part of Pocket’s Timescape series. This is my favorite cover, mostly for sentimental reasons—it’s the first Vance book I bought. I don’t know who the cover artist is, though.
The Compleat Dying Earth, published in 1999 by the Science Fiction Book Club, collected all four books in the series. Cover art by Brom.
Another omnibus edition, this time published by Orb (2000). I saw this at bookstores and passed on it because I thought it might be space opera or, even worse, hard SF. The purpose of cover art is to increase sales, not hurt them!
The Dying Earth got the limited edition hardcover treatment once again in 2013, this time published by Subterranean Press, with artwork by Tom Kidd.
Previous Dying Earth articles on the DMR Books Blog:
The Dying Earth - Reviewed by Jon Zaremba
D.M. Ritzlin founded DMR Books in 2015 with the aim of revitalizing sword-and-sorcery literature. DMR’s publications include reprints of classic material by authors such as Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, as well as brand-new collections and anthologies by some of the finest fantasy writers active today. A collection of his own stories, Necromancy in Nilztiria, was released in October 2020. Nilztiria is a world of adventure and strangeness, peopled by lusty heroes and callous villains. The thirteen sword-and-sorcery stories presented in Necromancy in Nilztiria place the emphasis on sorcery and mix in a touch of gallows humor. Click the cover for more information.