Over My Shoulder
- OVER MY SHOULDER - An acrylic painting done on size 16 x 20 canvas board. It appears on the dust jacket of the book, "Over My Shoulder," by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, published by Oswald Train in 1983.
Mr. Eshbach was the founder of FANTASY PRESS, one of the small press book publishers that started producing science fiction books in the mid 1940s. Over the ensuing years book sales were not high enough for him to keep his publishing company going, and in the early 1960s he decided to stop publishing.
In "Over My Shoulder" Eshbach writes about his venture into the book publishing business, and goes on with a history of the other small press publishers who struggled to survive at that time.
In 1950 I began to read and collect science fiction books, and of all those small press publishers that were active then, I consider the "Fantasy Press" books as having the perfect size and format; they are all uniform in size, with cloth bindings, gold lettering on the spines, good paper stock and an easy reading type-font. The authors were the great ones, like Heinlein, E. E. Smith, Campbell, Williamson, Weinbaum and Van Vogt. The artists used for the dust jackets and interior drawings were often my favorites, like Edd Cartier and Hannes Bok.
In the 1940s and 1950s, major book publishers produced very few science fiction titles, so Fantasy Press along with the other small press outfits were something special to SF readers like me. Book stores rarely displayed SF titles so I ordered all my books through a Julius Ungar ad in "Astounding SF," taking advantage of his offer; "buy 2 books, get a third one free". It was exciting to get those books in the mail, I still have most of them. I am disappointed though, that the fans did not buy more of those small press books to help keep them in business.
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