Unfortunately many of the cover paintings from the 1940s to the 1960s were kept in a warehouse near the river and in a terrible storm they were destroyed ... most of the NYC publishers had art and records in that building. It was a great loss.

Since then the painters don't sell the original art, just the reproduction rights. So they photograph or scan the art and send that in.

Everybody's got their favorites. I'm a big fan of the "unfinished art" look from the 1950s and 1960s. Think the original Hondo knife fight cover. There's no real background and the brush strokes around the figures just stop and the background color takes over. We had a series of "Retro Books" planned using these covers just before Lost Treasures got going but Lost Treasures squeezed them out of the schedule. Each had a "pitch line" on the front like: "He was as Merciless as the Frontier that Bred him." VERY corny, but old school fun. Oddly, we discovered that we couldn't do the yellow page edges that they used back then. Whatever technology they used to produce that effect is gone.

I try to stick to just dealing with the art and leave the rest of the cover to the Art Dept, that way they don't resent me too much. I'm not supposed to be designing covers, they have very talented people to do that but I know the stories and the audience better than they do.

Here's a FB Live that Greg and I did ... LOTs of info about the business of covers and our work together. -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu5k62ZKVGs --