prior, like MacFadden-Bartell, and many I don’t remember off hand now. I did the covers, spec type, photo-lettering of cover titles, and the back covers were designed too. We figured out how thick the spine would be, we wrote the copy on the back covers, and all those teaser things. I was a consultant art director for all those publishers. “Bob Maguire did a line drawing style in some of his backgrounds, so as not to take away from the main figure in his cover art. Rudy Nappi painted a full background to play it safe, but I had them both doing Ace Books for years, since I had all of Ace Books with my artists for a long time. Maguire and Nappi really knocked out these covers, and since Ace didn’t pay much it was a matter of delivering as much as you can to make out at the time. Also, they were able to knock out lots of Tower covers as fill-ins. These accounts were also used while waiting around for okays on layouts from other companies and to start new artists in the field. Later I was able to take book covers around to better accounts to up the prices for them. “There was something called photo lettering. Some letterer would design a letter and make the whole alphabet and then they made photographs of it. You could buy it condensed, squat, elongated, however you wanted it for the cover and we used it for the cover title. I showed the artist where to leave space on the cover for the title, so about one third was dark or
light for the titling, otherwise they’d have to cut the panel and put it in. “At one time Bantam Books came out with 52 Westerns. They wanted to flood the market so they could kill competition, which was my guess. Len Leone needed 52 Western covers in a short time, and I got at least half of them. A lot of my guys did the covers, Ron Lesser, Roger Kastel, and I introduced Carl Hantman’s work to art director Len Leone, and he bought Carl’s samples plus gave him assignments. This may have been around 1962. Roger Kastel (wanted me to start him on paperback covers—in a short while he was on Bantam) he did the cover art for Jaws, the paperback published by Bantam Books, and the same art was used for the movie. He got more for second rights than he did for first rights! Roger Kastel was one of my top-notch artists and he came to me one day and said that Bantam gave him an exclusive contract. What Bantam was trying to do was to tie him up with Bantam, so he couldn’t work for anybody else. He got a contract to do a few books a month. One publisher hears what’s going on and they all start to do the same thing, and all of a sudden I’m losing men left and right. “Let me tell you something. I remember when I got married and I was living in Brooklyn for about six years. You got on the subway and mostly women are reading books and men were reading the newspaper. I used to look at the covers and said
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