Ink, paper, and sorcery

Summoning glorious cover art from vintage fantasy paperbacks

Welcome to legend lore, traveler.

Once in a while, when the moon is crooked and the shelves creak, I cast a dark and ancient spell. Its effect? Not to banish dragons or smite necromancers, but to summon something stranger: the wild, weird, and glorious cover art of vintage fantasy paperbacks—think the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.

These books were the doorway drug for a generation. Painted warriors posing like demigods, sorceresses draped in impossible fabric, dragons that looked like they’d escaped from a heavy metal album cover. Some of the stories inside were brilliant, some… weren’t.

But the covers? The covers were pure magic.

Here in this corner of detect magic, I’ll be unearthing these artifacts one by one. Think of it as paging through a wizard’s scrapbook: half history, half fever dream, all fantasy.

There’s no schedule, no binding oath. Posts appear when the spell stirs, or when I find a cover too weird, too wonderful, or too gloriously retro to keep to myself.

The only rule… I have to find it in the wild. No eBay, no Amazon… only grungy old used bookstores and antique shops. Takes a little more work but will keep these covers entirely random and hopefully include some that aren’t all Frank Frazetta.

So if you enjoy your fantasy with a dash of pulp and a wink of sorcery, stay a while. The shelves are deep, the art is wild, and the past has a way of coming back when you least expect it.