Jim Burns - Lightship

Year: 1985
Publisher: Paper Tiger/Dragon´s World
ISBN: 1850280118
Content: 124 pages with mostly colour illustrations

My collection of artbooks didn´t start with this one - but on the other hand, somehow it did. It was Mirage from Boris Vallejo, through which I first entered the realms of science fiction and fantasy illustrations (and the impressive backup catalogue of Paper Tiger) back in 1985 in the exclusive foreign language bookshop in Budapest, Hungary... But only a year later, maybe my fifth or tenth of these artbooks I became destined to collect over the following 25 years was this special gem, the collected Jim Burns in Lightship. The spaceships designs, the lifeforms were so intensively "alien", in terms of out of this world, and yet so beautifully crafted, with such impressive accurateness when it came to backgrounds, clouds, planets, that I was (and when I occasionally take this one off the shelf, still am) simply buffed, stunned, amazed. It opened the world of scifi illustration to a whole new dimension for me.

But enough of this, on to the facts :)
Jim Burns was by publication of this volume already a known label in artbooks history, he made his first appearance as cover and interior artist for the art collection Mechanismo by Pierrot. The very same publisher later took Harry Harrisons novelette and ordered the illustrated book Planet Story, with both of these books later being picked up and translated by Moewig in Germany.

Lightship was the first solo collection of covers done for Silverberg (Majipoor Chronicles), Harrison, Dick, Clarke and others, as well as unpublished or other rare materials. The book has been published both in hard- and softcover version, and throughout the 80´s also in German by Moewig and alpha. The English edition is available on ebay or amazon at very reasonable prices. It should be owned by every fan of science fiction and/or fantasy, whether or not interested in artbooks...

You can see a few page samples of the book and more from Jim at his webpage.