The painters of Silistra

Janet Morris’s Silistra books were sold as painted paperbacks in the late 1970s, the same years this archive pretends a Universal picture might have existed. The novel is real. The film is not. The covers, though, are part of why the series still looks like a movie that never got made.

High Couch of Silistra arrived from Bantam in 1977 with a cover by Boris Vallejo — one of the most recognizable science-fantasy painters of the decade, later collected and reprinted under his own name. The original art has been auctioned as a Bantam cover illustration; Vallejo’s studio still offers a signed print of The High Couch of Silistra. Morris was not a fan. In a later interview quoted by Black Gate she said she “hadn’t liked the Boris cover,” and Bantam eventually commissioned replacements.

The sequel, The Golden Sword (1977), was painted by Bob Larkin, the Marvel and Doc Savage illustrator whose paperback Conan and superhero work defined a whole rack of 1970s genre covers. Larkin returned for the fourth volume, The Carnelian Throne (1979). The first Bantam edition of Wind from the Abyss (1978) went out uncredited; if a house artist did that wrap, the public record still does not name them with certainty.

Around 1981 Bantam reissued the quartet with a matched set by Lou Feck, a prolific paperback illustrator (and a safer house style after Vallejo’s star turn). In 1984–85 Baen Books packaged the series again, this time with covers by Victoria Poyser; the first volume was retitled Returning Creation. Those later editions are how a lot of readers met Estri in the 1980s — cooler palette, more “Baen fantasy,” less Bantam cheesecake.

Perseid Press’s Author’s Cut volumes, the ones linked from this archive’s Store page, use still newer packaging. They are the editions to buy. Thumbnail jackets below are Amazon’s current listing images, unaltered and linked to those products — not scans of the Vallejo, Larkin, Feck, or Poyser paintings.

This note is about those painters, not a license to reproduce their work. For the 1977 Vallejo and the other first-edition wraps, see the Black Gate gallery of the four Bantam paperbacks, or Vallejo’s own print of The High Couch of Silistra. Then buy the books in print.