A View From Corona #20 — John Berkey, a Remembrance

Jeremy Lassen | May 5th 2008 at 5:45 pm

“The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of Downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in patient search of prey.”

- Fritz Leiber, Our Lady Of Darkness

One of the many pleasures I take from my duties at Night Shade is working with the artists who do our covers. I’ve worked with first time illustrators and industry masters who’s work I’ve been seeing and admiring for years. I’m not an artists, and I’ve never been to art school, but I’ve been forced to play at being at art director — Necessity is the mother of all bitches… More often then not, being the art director is an absolute joy. Sometimes, given my limited budgets, It can be quite embarrassing. I once received a response to a cover query that was positively vitriolic. It made clear to me in no uncertain terms that low offers like mine were part of the problem in the industry. That I was at once insulting him, and destroying the industry with low ball offers that make it impossible for working illustrators to make a living. I was part of the problem, and I should be ashamed of myself!!!

I thanked this artist for his quick response (He responded to my email query in less then 12 hours) and went about my day. Because what can I say? I know that while his response may have been bit overblown, there was a core truth to it… that artists are terribly underpaid. I didn’t disagree, but in this one case, and in too many others cases, there isn’t a lot I can do about it. I don’t have a German conglomerate backing me… I don’t have a cash-cow-title from a mega-author that pays for the rest of the year’s production schedule. What I do publish often has very tight margins, and I have real limitations as to what I can offer. I’m not trying to be cheap. I’m just trying to stay in business. But my tight margins are not a working illustrators problem. They need to make a living, and I don’t begrudge them when they can’t work for what I can pay.

A similar embarrassing moment happened when I approached John Berkey to do the cover for the Hammer’s Slammers omnibus series. John didn’t really do email, but I was able to get him on the phone, and I pitched him the project. John had a very sweet high pitched voice, with a slight crack in it. And he didn’t have a Minnesota accent per say, but as I grew up in Minnesota, the lilt and cadence of his voice seemed very familiar, and reassuring. He asked a couple questions about what I wanted, and when I told him what I could pay, he said to me in the kindest voice possible “Well, it should be more then that, shouldn’t it?” This response… the complete opposite of the above vitriolic response, was far more painful then the angry email. I’ve let down and insulted this very nice, grandfatherly figure who’s work is some of the most influential in the field.

I instantly agreed with him. I stammered out something to the effect of: “It IS to low, Mr. Berkey, and I do apologize for that. But this project is a relatively niche item (A hardcover omnibus of a series that is still in print in mass market paperback) and I just don’t have any more room in my budget. It’s the best I can do for this title.” He considered this briefly, and agreed to work on the project. He didn’t lord it over me, or rub my nose in it by telling me how much of a favor he was doing for me. He just did it. He was doing me a favor by agreeing to work on the Slammers projects, but he was a perfect gentleman about it. He turned in a cover on a very short deadline, and perfectly matched the visual models that I had provided. Working with him on the second Slammers cover was an even more rewarding experience, as we had a better time frame, and the nature of the first piece gave me the idea for the look and fell of the series — I knew exactly what I wanted, and John turned in a beautiful rendering of a scene from the book.

I got to work with John again, when we reprinted Glen Cook’s Passage at Arms. The original cover was a John Berkey painting, and I felt it would still work, with a new design, and John agreed to let us re-use it. Given the uniqueness of John’s work, I felt that his style was a great way to “brand” the Glen Cook science fiction novels we were publishing. There was an unpublished Berkey piece in Spectrum that just screamed “Space Opera” and John agreed to let us use it for Cook’s The Dragon Never Sleeps.

He also give me a selection of other pieces to choose from for The Years’ Best Fantasy Vol. 2. During his time, I started asking John about the Slammers Volume Three cover, and he very gamely agreed to another tight deadly. But as this deadline approached, I called his home and learned that he had suffered a fall and wouldn’t be able to finish the work. I assured his wife that this was no problem, and wished him a speedy recovery. His wife told me that the last few paintings he did caused him a great deal of physical pain to do, and that he just wouldn’t be up to doing any more, no matter how things went. John’s inability to continue painting, either commercially, or for his own pleasure was awful to contemplate, and the flurry of materials that John sent me in the preceding year took on a whole new layer of meaning.

I was sad about this turn of events, but felt very lucky to have had a chance to work with one of the most influential SF artists of all times. The fact that he was warm and friendly, and a wonderfully sweet man was an added bonus. Though I shouldn’t have been surprised by his death last week, the news did catch me off guard, and filled me with a great melancholy. The genre has lost one of its truly wonderful and unique imaginations. Though he lived a relatively long life, I can hear the words he spoke to me when we he first agreed to work on a Night Shade cover: “It should be more, shouldn’t it?” It absolutely should, John. It should. Death is always too soon.

It is my great blessing that I was able to work with him, and it is my duty to bear witness, and remember him. The cover of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Two features a previously unpublished work by John. Though the book is already printed and bound, and you won’t find it anywhere in the book, I’d like to dedicate the volume to John and his work. He was truly a giant who walked the earth - A giant who’s work casts a long shadow over the science fiction genre, and a giant-hearted man who will be missed.

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