Robert M
Blevins,
you are NO fun!
Let the poor guy do his thing. So what if its a tad crazy? At least it's exciting.

Actually I agree with Robert on these two points:

The poster should be shared in a public space and I intend to do so once several siginitures are on it. Asking a private gallery owner to make a charitable donation in exchange for displaying the poster for a time is a very good idea.

Now the biggest problem will be how to transport the poster around without damage...I was thinking about that today. Maybe two large pieces of stiff cardboard or something. The mailing-it-around thing was a problem, I could see that. You could do it a few times, I suppose. When we receive copies here of our Official Adventure Books poster, they put it in a tube, but they also use that thin foam on both sides, then roll it up. Using a tube bigger than usual will help.
As Tom Hanks once said to Wilson the Volleyball in Cast Away: 'This could work.'
I hope Ursula K. LeGuin made the cut, by the way. She's one of my favorite sci-fi writers.

It would be okay if he could afford a good quality black portfolio, otherwise there are nice black plastic tubes for carrying posters around, some even have a shoulder strap on them. I don't know if it will be rollable, or if he will have to carry it flat. Those are my two suggestions.

What is fair when it comes to copyright laws—and I’m thinking of the composite poster here. If you buy a science fiction magazine with artwork on the cover and put it on a shelf with the spine facing out, is that ok? If you take the same magazine and face it out so that your guests can see it or lay it on a coffee table so that your guests can see it, is that ok? Now if you take this magazine and reproduce the cover and frame the image and put it up on your dining room wall, is that ok? Then if you reproduce a bunch of covers from over a fifty year period as a montage, and have all the author’s represented by those covers sign them—because they’re (note the spelling here, Braling II) the most lovable people in the world and you just want to hug them—is that ok? Now you paid your two bits for your copies and the used bookstore paid their two bits for their used copies and the authors got their original two bits when the stuff was originally sold, right?

Now think of this. In some future time when a wonderful author is no longer with us but his estate owns the copyright on all of his works, they will make money from the resale of his work (as long as they control it and do not let it be stolen). But wait! All of the publishing houses have lost confidence in reinvesting in these old titles and do not republish. A generation goes by and no one remembers. Tragic! But if only people knew, perhaps they would buy. After all, the publishers are mistaken and the titles will sell once available. Comes a horseman carrying a poster containing the cover of one of his books, a sense of wonder follows, the publishers reconsider and the estate once again makes a buck.

I’m against theft. I’m against piracy. I’m all for creative people getting every cent they deserve. But I think that there is a level of product manipulation performed by fans that is really to everyone’s mutual benefit in that it only amounts to free advertising.

Time to go listen to some jazz.

I just wish I would've thought of this fifteen years ago. So many of science fiction's great names from the golden age passed on in the 1990's. Of course fifteen years ago this project would've required a lot of color photocopying and then cutting and gluing onto some kind of board, rather than being generated entirely on a computer.

For both carrying and mailing I was planning on rolling up the poster and using thick cardboard tubing or hard plastic tubing, or both. Protective foam sheeting is a good idea to roll on the inside of the poster to avoid surface scratches from small dust particles. But I'm planning only a few mailings, the rest of the signitures I'll have to obtain by attending conventions with the poster in hand.

The most fun I think will be watching the reactions of the authors as I unroll this thing in front of them. Hopefully, they will be amused and will resist the urge to punch me in the face.

For maximum visibility of the autographs, I'm planning to ask the authors to sign the white boarder I've left around the edges, rather than trying to fit their signiture directly over their two-by-three-inch cover in the middle of the poster, which may or may not be of an appropriate color for black marker to show up against...I may have to carry silver and gold sparkly magic markers...

Ursula K LeGuin is represented on my poster twice: The Lathe of Heaven's original cover is placed next to a Philip K Dick cover (LeGuin dedicated that novel to PKD) and The Dispossessed paperback cover is also on the poster. I resisted the temptation to include a third cover by LeGuin for The Left Hand of Darkness.

Wherever possible, I've chosen to use the first edition cover art of any particular book. Some of the choices were forced upon me because I couldn't find a good quality scan of the cover online. Generating my own image using a consumer-grade scanner was out of the question from the beginning because these scans usually turn out rather dull-looking or somehow drained of color. So, even though I own at least one copy of almost every book I selected for the poster, I was forced to use images I could find on the internet.

In other cases the choices I made were purely asthetic, often because of color. A high percentage of SF book covers use black as the background color. Using many of these as small reproductions in a montage made the poster look bland, like all the covers just melted together with only a few really standing out. Covers with a lot of red in them were also a problem because red was a very popular color to use on SF covers throughout the classic period. Often I had to choose a less famous title from a particular author because I needed something in cooler tones to insert between black and red covers, all the while trying to make some interesting juxtapositions, commenting visually on the books and authors in question. Little things like making sure a LeGuin was next to a PKD, or mixing in a family tree of cyberpunk based around covers of Interzone Magazine, or placing an arrangement of covers from the British new wave marching out from issues of New Worlds Magazine were tough to do without making the whole thing look a mess. I'm not sure I've achieved all that but I wanted to make it amusing to anyone who really knows their stuff.

In a few cases I've chosen to represent authors by the cover of the magazine issue in which their first published story appeared, just to make it more interesting, sort of an inside joke for people who know a lot of trivia about the genre. Other times I placed one author directly beneath another author who was very influential in that particular case. Sometimes I used the cover art without the author's name or book title on it, so you'll recognize the picture but it may take you a second to place it.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Franky Baby,

Dear Franky, thank you for the more detailed description of what you have done in creating this poster as it is far different from the picture I had formed in my mind.

I am sure that many of the other readers of this Board will also appreciate knowing the work you have put into this as well.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: biplane1,

Hey, Chap, what jazz are you listening to?
I'm about to go down to Monterey and PLAY some this evening!

Braling II,
I envy you the talent.

I’m listening to “Dave Koz and Friends”. Ever hear his “’Twas The Night Before Christmas”?