Apr 29
Click for full imagePhil’s Art Direction: That’s the Bradbury story about an android grandmother, isn’t it? A sweet, family tale? Right, so let’s have either a muscle man or a horse on the cover. Better yet, a muscle man who IS a horse. And so ripped, that even his muscles have muscle men on them. On a wraparound cover.
Published in 1972
Outstanding! Good Show Phil!
(Average: 9.20 out of 10)
Loading...
Lastest Tweet
April 29th, 2010 at 11:30 am
Why do the muscle men on his arms not have little muscle men on theirs? And so on ad infinitum.
Marvellous piece of airbrushing. Not.
April 29th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
It is amazing. It’s also good that he has taken time to add some blusher to his cheeks! What strong centaur would be without?
April 29th, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Oh wow, sci fi for boytaurs.
April 29th, 2010 at 2:11 pm
35p? ha, i think not!
Wait, what the hell is in this book and why is there a quote from playboy on the back?
April 29th, 2010 at 2:21 pm
For some weird reason, seeing this cover makes my wrists hurt…
April 29th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Despite tremendous pressure from the publisher, Bradbury refused to change the title of the book to I SING THE BODY CENTAURIC WITH TINY MEN ON ITS ARMS.
😛
April 29th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
They go to all the trouble to make a horse man with horse man arms and that’s all they can do with the hair? Three times even! If Brian Eno during his Roxy Music days were to have a nightmare where he spent a night with a mare the ending wouldn’t look much different. The hair is that bad.
April 29th, 2010 at 5:26 pm
That’s the edition I own! Therefore I have an irrational love for this cover, but even so, come on everyone admit it – is this not, in its own peculiar way, a very special cover?
Either that or a special needs cover.
April 29th, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Simply brilliant! A real gem! 🙂
April 29th, 2010 at 7:37 pm
Doubly gelded!
I think the guy’s profile looks a little bit like the geezer from The Mighty Boosh. In a blond wig.
April 29th, 2010 at 8:42 pm
CSA, you should know that some men claim to buy PLAYBOY for the stories, and hence the erudite literary evaluation of Bradbury on the back cover.
I hadn’t noticed the 35p price tag. Ah, those were the days!
April 29th, 2010 at 10:16 pm
I have the later edition with a ruined Martian city on the cover. This looks like a Martian centaur who had his mates grafted onto his wrists after a very wild night out
April 30th, 2010 at 12:32 am
This is probably the book I am most embarassed to have on my shelves. I can only imagine what Bradbury must have thought of it.
April 30th, 2010 at 2:26 am
Isn’t that horse body that of a mare? Or at best a severe gelding? I guess the centaur is not much of a he-man after all.
April 30th, 2010 at 4:05 am
I swear I’m gonna hurt myself laughing at this. Best laugh all day!
April 30th, 2010 at 4:37 am
Thanks for the nightmare fuel. Even by my depraved standards, that cover is messed up.
April 30th, 2010 at 5:16 am
I can just hear the big centaur saying “Mini-me’s, you complete me!”
April 30th, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Lex, don’t feel any shame. Absolutely tremendous cover. Put it on public display, man! No hesitation!
Got to agree with James right at the top. If there’s anything that was missed, it’s the prime opportunity for endlessly recursive centaurs. Mandlebrot horsemen of the nightmare apocalypse.
Awesomely named cover artist as well (small print back cover).
April 30th, 2010 at 5:16 pm
I have covers for ‘Dandelion Wine’ and ‘Farenheit 451’ but they’re probably to blase to exhibit. I agree that at least another recursion should have been attempted but the whole picture is WTF?
April 30th, 2010 at 7:07 pm
I actually like the cover a great deal. Who wouldn’t want mini-me’s as their arms? I’d name them and make them do bad things….
May 4th, 2010 at 6:42 am
I wonder if he can actually control the hands of his wrist-centaurs, so in effect he has four hands. Or if he can’t and he has no hands and has to be satisfied with whatever his centaur hands hands’ pick up.
May 6th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
Oh, to be born with a puppet show at the end of my arms. Every day I could express myself through some Punch & Judy spectacular.
May 7th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
I am more disturbed by the presence of the Da Vinci Code on your bookshelf. Bad show, sir!
May 17th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
WOW I’ve seen this pop up multiple times on this site, and only just noticed the horseman has horsemen for hands. No wonder it’s the top rated one!
July 15th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
I read this as a kid in the mid 70s – my mum had it. oh, the glory days of $1.10 paperbacks! I got $1 a week pocket money, so could spend up to 90c on lollies one week and buy a paperback the next.
I saw absolutely nothing wrong with this cover when I was 10 – not the blusher, not the hair (actually I still like the hair – it looks like a mane, as it should), not the fact the torso is a human bloke but the horse is a mare (or, as someone said, a viciously gelded ex-stallion). I just thought it was groovy.
July 23rd, 2010 at 9:57 pm
This is by far the *second*-best triple-centaur I have seen all day.
(First-best was here: http://binsybaby.livejournal.com/688396.html#cutid1 )
July 25th, 2010 at 8:25 pm
The masturbation possibilities are literally endless…
July 26th, 2010 at 10:20 am
26 comments, and then someone lowers the tone! 🙂
November 6th, 2010 at 9:55 pm
Well, the title is from a poem by Walt Whitman, to which the illustration isn’t entirely inappropriate. And Whitman may have been a bit of a mare-bodied muscleman centaur himself, if you know what I mean.
December 30th, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Yo dawg, I herd you like punching, so I put fists on your fists so you can punch while you punch.
January 2nd, 2011 at 5:58 pm
“Tonight on 60 Minutes: When Steroid Use Goes Too Far.”
January 19th, 2011 at 2:28 am
I saw a special on PBS tonight that discussed the fallout between Serling and Bradbury regarding the screenplay for the Twilight Zone. Serling didn’t like it and cut part, citing monetary concerns, and Bradbury never really spoke with him again.
You don’t suppose that centaur armed centaurs had anything to do with the cut scene do you?
January 22nd, 2011 at 1:33 pm
Did Ray Bradbury really think this was ok? Throw him in jail! In fact, throw everyone in jail!
April 26th, 2011 at 8:18 pm
Between the ages of 13 and 15 I voraciously read every short story collection of Ray Bradbury’s I could find, except one. Guess which one. Why? Because THIS was the cover of the copy that my high school library had. I wouldn’t touch it, it was too horrible. It was so bad, that I wouldn’t watch the Twilight Zone based on the story FOR YEARS. I finally managed to bury the horror in the depths of my memory, saw the Twilight Zone and went on to live a normal life until you guys had to dig it up again and remind me. Noooooooo…never underestimate the long term effects of an awful cover.
May 16th, 2011 at 3:18 am
I believe that this image may have been the germ of the character Ichthuhuu in The Tick.
June 2nd, 2011 at 7:18 am
After having just watched the Twilight Zone episode… seriously… where the heck did the centaur come from?
Then again it’s not like anyone really keeps to the “in the book on the cover” rule. At least I kinda understand the artistic representation behind it… I think…
October 16th, 2011 at 12:37 am
How does he wipe his arse?
October 16th, 2011 at 8:51 pm
Noel, I can only assume he follows the horse side of his cultural heritage. When did you last see a horse wipe its arse? (Let’s keep that as a rhetorical question; I really don’t want to know!)
April 24th, 2012 at 5:05 am
So when he brushes his teeth, do the little horse-men get a set of brushes, or do they live on the leftovers they pick from his teeth and that’s why they exist? AND WHO BRUSHES THEIR TEETH?
— NO, wait, i don’t want to know!
April 25th, 2012 at 3:47 pm
There are more questions than answers…
June 8th, 2012 at 12:01 pm
Rationally, I know that Ray Bradbury will be remembered for his poetic prose, his soaring imagination, and for breaking down genre boundaries.
But in my darker moments, I see people in a literature-free 24½th Century looking at this picture and wondering…
June 8th, 2012 at 3:34 pm
@Phil: It is artistic hubris to think that the cover art of Ray Bradbury’s work will be more remembered than his writing. Even if M C Escher himself had done cover art for Bradbury, even George Tooker (who I think would have been really appropriate in many ways) or Remedios Varo, I think Bradbury’s writing would always endure as the best, lasting part of his life.
I say this as an artist. Great writing is great writing, and the cover art is merely the presentation.
This cover hasn’t harmed Bradbury, thank goodness, and will probably be forgotten long before Bradbury’s work itself fades into history.
February 5th, 2013 at 9:14 pm
If the muscle men on his arms eat food, where does the poop go?
March 12th, 2013 at 8:23 pm
Remedios Varo never did a book cover, much less a sci-fi book cover, did she? If she ever did a cover, it would of course have to be CRYING OF LOT 49, but she died before it was published. Possibly that is not a *fatal* impediment (on this site, at least), but it makes it harder. Magnificent artist, at any rate.
April 26th, 2013 at 2:21 pm
He quite literally can’t tell his arse(s) from his elbows.
July 13th, 2013 at 9:49 pm
My teenager’s response to seeing this image is, “When you described it to me, I thought it would look strange. But this looks even stranger than I thought.”
July 18th, 2013 at 10:18 pm
The meeting went: “No robots! Any cover art but ROBOTS!” “Uhm, ok, I can deal with that…”
December 21st, 2013 at 12:47 am
As an Illustration student i can honestly say that after spending some (much) time looking at this cover I’ve decided that everything i produce from now on must be more like this, regardless of whats actually required. This will surely bring success.
January 25th, 2015 at 10:22 pm
This cover is one of the single most hilarious things I have ever seen in my live. I have no idea what kind of drugs the artist was taking when they decided to adorn this book with a recursive gelded centaur wearing blush, but they certainly made people notice the book if nothing else. I have no idea what Mr. Bradbury thought of this cover, but I doubt he was pleased. This cover is so surreal I rated it 10 just for the humour value.
*hysterical laughter at sheer ridiculousness of this cover*
January 24th, 2016 at 8:51 pm
Oh, hey, why don’t I inspire today’s youth and experience ineffable enlightenment by resurrecting a six year old blog post?
May 11th, 2016 at 10:30 pm
Cover recycled from Hemingway’s A Hel-LO! to Arms.
July 21st, 2016 at 12:42 pm
Thought it was worth pointing out this is finally about to drop out of the top ten.
January 19th, 2017 at 5:27 am
As of this comment, this cover remains at #1 AND #8 in the Top Ten.
It is a mighty, mighty piece of art indeed.
January 21st, 2017 at 3:24 pm
On its own, the surreality of this image would be remarkable, but only briefly…but when paired with the story for which the book is named, it works a cliché in reverse, going so far into the ridiculous that it nearly becomes sublime. Words barely exist to describe the utter weirdness of the juxtaposition here, as every comment proves—hilarious as they are (and I literally LOLed my way through this thread), one has only to let one’s eyes stray back to the cover itself to be once again utterly floored by the sheer mindscrew of the combination of story and image.
I can’t help noticing, though, that when paired with the only the WORDS of the book title (as if the Bradbury story never happened, and only Walt Whitman inspired the artist), the picture not only makes an odd sort of sense, but almost achieves a bizarrely eloquent kind of kitsch poetry. While it’s a swing and a miss when held up to the Whitman poem, the picture does manage to echo the same theme in a pop-art, Andy Warhol-esque way—touching simultaneously on self-image, narcissism, the shallowness of modern culture, the amorphousness of gender roles, the worship of appearance, the animal drives at the base of human nature, and the ephemerality of youth and physical “perfection.”
And then you look at it again, and it’s still a mare-bodied muscle guy with muscle guys on his arms. The sublime goes back to the ridiculous, and the cycle begins again….
May 4th, 2017 at 4:09 am
When watching yourself flex in the mirror just isn’t enough anymore…
May 4th, 2017 at 7:21 am
“I heard you’re hiring puppeteers for the next season of The Mupp–”
“Say no more! You’re hired!”