I've been looking in to some of the brands and trade dress and cover artists who were popular in the field when I was a kid and teenager, really getting in to fantasy and science fiction (but especially fantasy. Although keep in mind that through the 80s, they were not actually branded as two different things yet.) The traditional publishing industry has become incredibly cancerous; it can't seem to publish anything that I really want to save its life--literally; the industry is dying on the vine--but in the 80s that was not true. Not only was it publishing a lot of stuff that I liked, but in the used book market, I was still finding stuff that had been published in the 60s and 70s. Not to mention the fact that some of what I bought in the 80s were second (or more) printings of what has originally came out in the 70s. Some of my favorites:
TSR was a surprisingly prolific, or at least it was surprising to me, of fantasy novels in the 80s, and some of their novels, like the original Icewind Dale trilogy by R. A. Salvatore and the original Dragonlance trilogy by Weis and Hickman, were genuine best-sellers. Because of this, the TSR in house artists became very well-known in the fantasy world; Larry Elmore did the Dragonlance covers, as well as the first Icewind Dale book, although Clyde Caldwell and Jeff Easley did the third. Elmore did all of the Dragonlance books.
Tor Books published the Conan pastiches during the 80s, including by many of them written by Robert Jordan. Jordan later turned Tor into a real fantasy powerhouse, of course, in the 90s with his Wheel of Time series. Wheel of Time, of course, had the Darrell K. Sweet covers. He was one of the most important fantasy cover artists of the 70s and 80s, and you could hardly pick up a random half dozen or so fantasy books during those decades without getting a Sweet cover or two. He was so prolific, that estimates of how many of his pieces ended up in print are over 1,000 and up to nearly 3,000. Not only these, but he did the 80s versions of Lord of the Rings, Thomas Covenant, and many more; some of the most popular and well-known works in print. The only cover artist who may challenge him for recognizability is Michael Whelan, but even then, I think Sweet was more easily recognizable and iconic, and the books he did were bigger than ones Whelan did. Not that that's a slight on Whelan; he did the 80s prints of the John Carter books, which I love, for instance, and he did the Pern books, which while kind of forgotten today (it seems) were extremely popular in the 80s.
Ballantine Books, which was owned by Random House but operated as a more or less independent brand since the early 70s, published a lot of my favorite books in the 80s. They also developed the Del Rey brand specifically for genre works, but not everything I have was Del Rey. Lord of the Rings was, at least the version that I grew up with. But the Tarzan books were notably published by Ballantine.
That's what I'm warming up to, actually; The black label Tarzan reprints by Ballantine, which started in the mid to late 70s and remained in print throughout the 80s are some of my favorite "fantasy" covers, and I absolutely love them. I don't have the full set, but I have many of them. Neal Adams was originally contracted to do all twenty-four Tarzan covers, but it became clear that the deadlines were too aggressive, so they split the series, and Adams ended up doing twelve and Boris Vallejo--another very prolific 80s artist--did the other twelve. Today, I'm going to post all twelve Adams covers as a Friday Art Attack. Wow, these were just great. I miss the trade dress and branding of the 80s. I don't feel like modern books really sell their content with the same gusto. Which I wouldn't do either if I were trying to sell that kind of woke slop that is much of what's getting published. I find that I'm honestly more interested in chasing older books in older printings most of the time. The time where publishers, cover artists, and to some degree even authors are strong brands in their own right seems to be over, and it's all a sea of sludge nowadays.
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