Children, I need your attention! Children? All eyes on me! Jeremy Dunlap! Eyes on me, please. Thank you. Now children, I want you to know that I am very proud of the work that you have done for the third grade art fair. Now, I have something very important to share with you. Are you listening to me? Jeremy! Now, children, as you know there will be some grownups judging the art at the art fair and there will be prizes awarded, including a $15 gift certificate to the art supply section of Target that was going to go to the first prize winner. But now there is a new prize for first place, so the certificate will now be for second place. The winner now will get to draw the cover for the Large Print edition of a book by Frank Slaughter called Battle Surgeon! Isn't that wonderful? Jeremy!
Battle Surgeon was actually quite popular in it's day. The author, Frank Slaughter, banged out more than 40 novels in a long career and sold over 60 million books. Perhaps the most successful author I'd never heard of. As with so many Large Print covers, they really skimped on cover design on this edition, but the regular print ones weren't a whole lot better. Here are a few of the earlier efforts:
I thought that the appalling image of blood/kisses on the surgical mask was enough to make we want to weed this one. But it also hasn't circulated in years. So out it goes.
Interesting, it appears that cover art has gone down in quality over the years instead of the other way around. The older two are books I can imagine putting on display or seeing people look at, the newest cover not so much!
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