jesse marinoff reyes ( Jesse marinoff reyes Design, Maplewood, N.J.)
High Fidelity
August 1958 issue
Illustration (and hand-typography): Richard M. Powers (1921-1996)
Art Director: Roy Lindstrom
Happy Birthday Richard Powers!
Richard Powers.
Most of us who groove on the work of Richard Powers do so mostly from his legion of science fiction paperback and jacket covers done from the late-1940s through the 1980s. Powers was brilliant and innovative on sci fi, doing more than any other cover illustrator to move the genre away from literal, space opera depictions of “the future” to a more surreal and abstract interpretation—focusing on the cerebral aspect of disseminating other worlds, other dimensions, other realities, and interpreting that visually (which he did rather successfully, coloring the entire genre until the popularity of STAR WARS made a comic booky, “Buck Rogers” vision of the future popular again). Out with the cerebral and in with the literal once again.
But Powers was a nimble stylist, with shades and variations on his approach that tailored to the topic—be it a sci fi comedy pastiche like Six-Gun Planet (Paperback Library, 1970) or a rugged, “men’s adventure”-style illustration that he adapted for the Tarzan covers he did for Ballantine. He was also quite successful at suggesting dread, which made his work on horror all the more riveting. But aside from the excellent work on sci fi and horror, the approach that stands out is a more Beat Generation style—suiting his personality—that he used on J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (Berkley, 1959), James Purdy’s Malcolm (Avon, 1959), and the hip, pop graphics he contributed to High Fidelity magazine like the example posted here. Indeed, he was a true “Jazzbo” in that his musical knowledge was quite advanced—suggested not only by this cover assignment, but the feature article he contributed to the issue, “Hipsters in the Bleachers,” a fully illustrated and written article reporting on the Newport Jazz Festival. He was truly a David Stone Martin of the Space Age.
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