eBook: A Princess of Mars Cover by Frank E. Schoonover
One of the classic editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars is the first printing, published by A.C. McClurg & Co. in 1917. Frank E. Schoonover, a top illustrator of the day, painted the cover and interior plates. Schoonover was a student of the master Howard Pyle – as was NC Wyeth – and there are definite similarities between the artists.
A Princess of Mars, 1917 First Edition, cover by Frank E. Schoonover
Taking a scan of the original painting, I explored what we might do today – with classic and modern typefaces – to create a cover.
Interior Illustrations
A New eBook
All of these wonderful illustrations have been packaged in a free new ebook, paired with elegant typography to bring print-quality book design to digital presentation.
“…Scott Dutton’s beautifully done ePUB, which is indeed an ePUB showcase…”
— Wizard Doitsu, MobileRead.com
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I like the bottom text the best. It seems to go with the era of the painting.
Hi Linda –
Thanks. I always find it helpful to try things that blend with images, and also what contrasts with them.
Here are a couple of comments on the covers from facebook :
“And we have a kilt as well! LOL. Oh, and the third version I prefer. Just seems cleaner to me. Not as ‘busy’ and also to the point.”
and
“I like the first two options – the colour of the dress echoed in the top bar which extends into the lettering. The lettering has a slightly alien feel, too.”
I prefer the 4th one. Very clean, really pops and the text really goes with the art well. 🙂
Thanks, Ms. K.
Your epub is truly a masterpiece of design! Thanks greatly for making it available.
Perhaps you can help me – as my web url shows I create epubs based on historic geologic books and articles. In many of these I need a font that contains small caps options, such as the Adobe Minion and Minion Pro fonts. I would use these fonts in my epubs, but I hav also believed that they are copyrighted by Adobe.
Thus, I was surprised to find you were using the Adobe Caslon fonts that I had thought copyrighted also. Do I need to get permission from Adobe to use the fonts, and if so, how would I go about obtaining permission?
Hi Bob –
If you’ve purchased your copies of Adobe’s typefaces, it is generally permissable – depending on the typeface and when you bought it – to embed it in electronic documents.
Small caps specifically is a problem currently in ePUBs. They just don’t display properly in ereaders for most extended OpenType fonts that contain them. If you have an older PostScript or TrueType font that is only small caps, you could convert that to OpenType, but I haven’t tried that. You could also do a character style workaround, tagging the lowercase letters with a smaller uppercase style, but the strokes would be thinner than they should be. Hopefully, with ePUB 3 coming, this issue will be fixed.
Thank you for your kind words about the book. I’ll have a look at some of your work as well. I have a soft spot for non-fiction book design.
To be honest, I don’t see any of the “updates” as an improvement on the original lettering. It just fits better with the painting.
It’s fortunate that we live in a time when we have access to the great works of the past, preserving them, as well as exploring, adapting and sharing those works with new generations. ePublishing allows us to serve the needs and wants of many different audiences, instead of limiting them to only one idea.
What a fun illustration to work with, Scott! Reminds me of the wonderful style of NC Wyeth!
Good eye. Schoonover and NC Wyeth were students of Howard Pyle.
I like your first one the best. Did not notice the crossbar missing from the ‘A’ at first glance, but as I look back and forth, the others are fine… just really, really prefer you first one (just under the original).
The missing crossbar reminds me a bit of the Alien movie titles, and seem to transmit that though the image is ‘fantasy’ (what with a sword and all), there is that sci-fi in the font. Plus the ‘fabric’-ish look in the red and the long lead down as the eye follows the sword into the image leaves it open without the text or a large top border disturbing the eye, yet set the title.
Hope that makes sense.
Sure thing. Thanks for your thoughts.
Really enjoyed your different cover options for A Princess of Mars and the choice to put the text for the interior illustrations on the illustration instead of underneath as per the original presentation. Having played with creating my own covers for Burroughs’ books in Paint, I appreciate the skill and time at work here. Having enjoyed viewing the other pages of Mars covers, for me this cover seems to be the most powerful and I equally like the interior illustrations for what they hint at as well as show.
I would like to download your epub version to see how the full book is presented, unfortunately the download link no longer works. Are able to make it live again please? Thanks and I look forward to future posts, having enjoyed your other posts on your work such as Claw (which I remembered buying when it was published).
Hi Colin –
Thanks for the kind words.
I just checked the download links and they’re working. Clicking on one brings up a Captcha challenge to pass. After that you’ll be presented with a download button.
Hi Scott, thanks for the reply.
I was getting as far as the Captcha challenge, but on clicking the link that then appeared I was getting an ‘invalid link’ message. However, I found after a bit of experimenting that if I didn’t click on the link after completing the Captcha challenge, the epub file downloaded automatically. So all sorted now thanks.
It’s a great presentation, thanks. Appreciate the details such as how the chapter headings match the colour of the cover banner. I agree with your comments elsewhere on your site that publishers should really put some effort into creating ebooks of a higher standard to lift the format. This is an example of the level of quality which should be generally provided by publishers.