Views from Medina Road

OK, so I spent a little while last night and this morning setting up a page of last year's book cover images, arranged by artist -- which I've posted here (warning! big page! may be slow to load; has 389 cover graphics).

The page has only covers for books I personally saw and listed on the site (and whose cover artists were credited), thus is light on UK and Australian books. For 2005, it should be easy enough to gather cover artist info on such books from the listings in Locus Magazine. I'll also include magazine covers on the 2005 list. And perhaps split the page up somehow.

I note that four of the 2005 Hugo nominated best artists -- Jim Burns, Bob Eggleton, Donato Giancola, and John Picacio -- all have at least a handful of items on this page, while the fifth, Kelly Freas, does not. Checking my magazine database, I don't see a 2004 Freas cover there either. Hmm. It's easy to understand why he was nominated, but I wonder if some sort of minimum qualifications analogous to those for other categories -- say, at least 4 book or magazine covers within the eligibility year -- would be appropriate. Or perhaps there is such a rule and I'm just missing the relevant covers.

UPDATE late afternoon -- I corrected some variant and mis-spellings of artist names and regenerated the page.

Also, I ran a little group query to see, based on this set of data (which I grant is far from complete), which artists have the most book covers.

16: Stephen Youll
11: John Picacio (H)
11: Bob Eggleton (H)
10: Michael Whelan
9: Les Edwards/Edward Miller
8: Paul Youll
7: Steve Stone
7: Dave Seeley
7: Scott Grimando
7: Tom Kidd
7: Cliff Nielsen
7: Stephan Martiniere
7: Donato Giancola (H)
6: Stephen Hickman
6: John Harris
6: John Jude Palencar
6: Jim Burns H
(0): Kelly Freas (H)

Where the H's indicate Hugo nominees and the winner.