For some of us old timers, it’s hard to believe that it has been almost 50 years since the “Burroughs Boom” of the ’60s. In 1962 both Don Wollheim at ACE Books, and Jack Biblo & Jack Tannen’s Canaveral Books began reprinting ERB titles that they believed to be in public domain. For the first time in their lives young Baby Boomers were able to readily find Burroughs’ Mars, Pellucidar and Venus tales, along with a few of the non-series titles, on the news stand and new bookstores rather than in antiquarian bookshops and the musty basements and attics of their grandparents.

In November, 1963, after a year of reprints, Canaveral began to publish true first editions of stories that had either only been available in magazine form or had been found in the archives at Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. after Ed had died. Their premier hardback first edition was the complete set of chapters that made up the final novel of ERB’s inner world, Savage Pellucidar. The first three parts had appeared in 1942 in Amazing Stories, but the last was not published until 1963. This hardback edition was the first time all four parts of the novel were printed together.

Through some mixup at Ziff-Davis, or in Ray Palmer’s office, the painting by J. Allen St, John intended to illustrate the third part, “Tiger Girl,” in Amazing Stories of April, 1942, was used as a cover on the March, 1942 issue of the sister magazine Fantastic Adventures, which contained another Burroughs tale, “War on Venus.” Thus the artwork publication preceded the story.

When Canaveral published the hardback edition they illustrated it with all the line drawings that St. John had done for the magazine publications but missed the chance to reunite the misplaced cover artwork with the final novel. This lapse was pointed out in Caz Cazedessus’ fanzine ERB-dom #14 (October, 1965) and he printed a recreation (artist uncredited) of the St. John cover, in black and white, with title lettering based on that used on the ERB, Inc. edition of Back to the Stone Age, to be used as an alternate dust jacket. Finally published in color on the back of ERB-dom #26 (June 1969) with art by G. M. Farley and a change to the author name lettering, that mockup was designed as a partial wraparound to be inserted in front of the Canaveral dj. The spine included the “doodad” symbol that was used on all the ERB, Inc. editions.

In 1999 while at the Burroughs Bibliophiles “Dum-Dum” in Tarzana, California, showing my first dust jacket replicas, I was asked by Pete Ogden, editor and publisher of the fanzine ERBANIA, to create a new alternate jacket from a fresh scan of the Fantastic Adventures cover. As a new element, I was also to use the front flap blurb text that Ed himself had written and which had been found in his papers after his death. I decided not to use the Burroughs’ symbol on the spine because I felt that it was really intended for those editions published by Burroughs himself. I did, however use a St. John illustration from the magazine publication to match the ERB, Inc. layouts. I reset all the type in the original fonts used by Canaveral and replicated the rest of the layout exactly. The only change I made was to do a colorized version of the photo of ERB on the back cover. The Savage Pellucidar alternate is really the most complete and accurate dust jacket for the book.

After I’d finished it, I took a copy to Danton Burroughs at ERB, Inc. to get his permission to sell it. He was very excited about it and noted with satisfaction that I had included the proper copyright notice for the blurb text. Later I sent a copy to Dick Lupoff who had been the editor at Canaveral in the 60s. He too was pleased and told me, “I wish we’d been able to turn out a jacket like this back in Canaveral Press days.”

Biblo and Tannen didn’t have the resources to publish their books with full color dust jackets. They were excited about their venture and they did the best they could with what they had. We still have to thank them for bringing greater attention to the art of Roy Krenkel and Frank Frazetta and for making these first editions finally available to Burroughs fans everywhere.

The other speculation is that, unlike most of the paintings St. John did for the A.C. McClurg & Co. editions, the lettering for this painting was probably done separately, “on paper” and added during the printing process. This idea is based on the fact that the artist only charged $250 (!) for the whole package which was less than the $300 he usually charged McClurg for a frontispiece and wraparound jacket job on which he did the titling directly on the painting. It was easier for him to do the lettering separately, money was scarce after the 1929 Crash, and he probably had to negotiate with Metropolitan since they were used to using their own in-house artists.

It may be that this painting still exists in the attic of some private home somewhere. We can only dream. . .

The first detail is from the scan of the actual dust jacket, showing the halftone rosettes that have to be smoothed out through the descreening process. Brushstrokes are visible through the screen.

This second detail shows the same section after some descreening and level adjustments to bring up the contrast and color.

The last detail shows the sharpened restoration of brushwork. This is still preliminary and will be checked over numerous times to bring out more detail such as the highlights on the top edge of Tarzan’s cheek bone.

Click on each image to get an even closer look.

After the usual descreening, rebalancing of the color and level adjustments I still wasn’t satisfied with how the art was looking. This is, after all, one of the most exciting paintings that St. John ever did of the Ape Man in action and it is also a lost painting (as far as we know), not one that is available for close examination or reproduction. I’d really like to see this as a large, 16×20-inch print. It will need some special work — as George McWhorter referred to it, “art forensics.” So, I’m going over it as tightly as I can to sharpen it up, basically repainting it stroke for stroke. I can’t go into detail about how I’m doing this right now, but it’s a slow process and I’ve put up some preliminary work on the Facebook page. I’ll put up an even more astounding section of the restored art on this blog real soon (I promise) and you’ll see where I’m going with this.

I hope it gets you as excited about it as I am.

All three use wraparound illustrations and each one incorporates a mix of fonts on the flaps. The flaps are typical in that they promote the book the jacket is for on the front flap and the other Burroughs books from Metropolitan with review quotes on the back flap. As far as I can tell Metropolitan Books, New York, never published any other than the four Burroughs’ books. There was another Metropolitan Books in Portland Oregon, but they only published a few titles in 1934 and 1935. However, one of those had illustrations by Mahlon Blaine who ended up living in an apartment over Biblo and Tannen and doing illustrations for the Canaveral editions of ERB’s books in the 1960s. Small world, eh?

So here’s the typographic tally for the three of the four Metropolitan’s I’m finishing up:

•  TANAR (1929) uses Cloister Bold for the flap copy, with Cloister Bold Italic for the names of the newspapers in the review quotes on the back flap. Both flaps use Cooper Black in the titles mixed with Cloister italic for the prepositions “of” and “and.” “By Edgar Rice Burroughs” is set on  two lines on both flaps in Cloister Bold Italic and Cloister Bold. “Author of. . .” lines are set in either Lino De Vinnne or Old Style No. 21. These seem to be the only fonts which have the curved start of the stem on the lowercase p. Very noticeable in the review quotes is the use of what Mac McGrew calls “modern” quotes (I could also describe them as reversed close quotes or reversed apostrophes) where the left quote glyphs have stems hanging from the ball rather than coming up from the ball (reversed 9s instead of 6s). Cloister was designed with these in it’s metal form as available from Linotype, Monotype and ATF, but for some reason they’re not found in any of the digital versions. Not even the LTC version from P-22, usually so accurate in their designs. What a shame! I hope someone corrects this oversight some day soon. In the meantime I’ll just make my own adjustment.

•  TEC (1930) uses Bodoni for most of the text, with Poster Bodoni (or Ultra Bodoni) for the title promo on the front flap. The publisher’s name is set in Cooper Black on the bottom of the front flap. On the back flap there is a promotional paragraph about ERB, set in Bodoni italic, along with reviews for “Tanar of Pellucidar” and “Tarzan and the Lost Empire” set in Bodoni and Bodoni Italic. The titles of those books are set in Cooper Black as is the publisher’s name. Not a lot to remark about, typographically, on this jacket.

•  FMM (1931) uses an Old Style font for the text copy. All OS fonts are difficult to identify because of overall similarities and only slight variations. Combine that with the  variations from point size to point size of the metal types and you see the primary difficulty I’ve had with this project from the very beginning. However, one clue points to Linotype Old Style No. 1 as the likely font: the calligraphic g in the italic. This kind of g has a left-facing bowl and a tail that sweeps down to the left as we would expect in handwriting or lettering. Hence, “calligraphic.” Most of the OS faces have a “two-story” g in their italic fonts. There are a few other Old Style fonts that have this g but the final distinguishing mark is the lower case p which retains the starting of the bowl’s stroke on the left overlapping the stem. This is typical of the Caslons and different from some of the other Old Styles like De Vinne or Lino Number 21 which show the curved serif at the top of the stem itself. The titles of the books promoted on the front and back flaps are all in Cheltenham Bold, a display face often seen on the A.C. McClurg jackets as well. On the front flap “A Fighting Man of Mars” is set on three lines in all caps. On the back flap there are two promos: “TARZAN  at the Earth’s Core,” and “TANAR of Pellucidar,” with “Tarzan” and “Tanar” widely spaced in all caps to fill the column width. Under those title displays, the words “By Edgar Rice Burroughs,” in two lines, are set in what appears to be Caslon No. 3 Italic and Regular, respectively. At the bottom of each flap the publisher name and address, “Metropolitan Books, Inc., 150 Nassau Street, New York” is set on two lines in Caslon Bold Condensed, all caps, with the exception of the “nc” in “Inc.” which uses small caps.

Though “Tarzan and the Lost Empire” was the first book that Metropolitan published, in 1929, it is a different sort of animal than the other jackets in that it is all line art. A much more graphic treatment than the paintings we’re used to from J. Allen St. John at McClurg. Burroughs wanted Metropolitan to use St. John, but they had their own house artists and wanted to keep costs down. In doing a restoration of TLE I’m working on pulling out the line art and actually laying it over the color block so that it will have the cleanest possible look. I’ve had a chance to get acquainted with the art as it was printed by Grosset and Dunlap and, subsequently, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. and getting a better idea of what might have happened with it in production. But that’s another story for a another time.