Views from Medina Road

I spent an hour this evening putting together the 2005 Cover Art Gallery of book and magazine cover images. Unlike the earlier 2004 gallery, the '05 page includes magazine covers, which entailed a bit of time to extract and blend records from two different databases.

Also, on the '05 list, I omitted reprint books, which are mostly paperback reprints of last year's hardcovers, because they generally use the same cover art. Since the purpose of the list is to gather artworks that would make their creators eligible for the Best Artist categories of the Hugo Awards (or the Locus Poll), it seems reasonable to omit 'reprint' art.

I did however include cover art from 'classic reprints' as compiled on Locus Online, since those are generally new editions with new artwork.

I have yet to gather covers for books I haven't personally seen (based on listings elsewhere), including art books whose subjects have often made it onto Hugo ballots even when they haven't done many covers. Also still to do, I'll probably reformat the page to arrange covers in rows with smaller type beneath each one, rather than the present lengthy vertical list. And there are some other filters I might impose; at the moment nothing filters out 'classic' art used on book and magazine covers.

It will be interesting to see if this list has any noticeable influence on next year's Hugo nominees for best artist....