Cover Art: Paul Lehr

This was the cover art for John Boyd's The Last Starship from Earth. The art was done by Paul Lehr. I'd be hard pressed to guess how many books I have owned with art by Lehr; he was used by Ace Books, Pyramid, the Science Fiction Book Club and other houses from the 1960's and well into the 1970's.

The covers never had much to do with the books, but they were very "lookable" and I often studied them and copied them. Often they were dominated by some sort of central figure (be it a person, monster, mountain, city or...giant head) and were dominated by one color. There was a collection of Lehr's works several years ago, alas, out of print.

I have not read this book in many years. It was a quirky tale of a dystopian society (very much in the mode of a lot of science fiction in the late 1960's to the late 1970's). As I recall, it involved space travel, time travel, religious and political oppression and even (gasp) some very vague sex.