III

I first noticed Bruce's work in the early 70s on the haunting cover of Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. For a while his work popped up everywhere, notably on the cult Dune novels. Then in 1976 came Eschatus, his inspired interpretation of Nostrodamus' prophecies. Wonderfully doomy. So I leaped at the chance to interview him. The problem was that he didn't really want any text at all in this book. The compromise was to bunch it at the front of each chapter so it didn't interfere with the pictures.

This was interesting because Ciruelo had only been learning English for three months and my Spanish was much poorer. But with the aid of his lovely wife Daniela we got along famously and the book took no longer than usual.

The cover shows how compromise can often be creative. Ciruelo wanted it pure white with just the lettering. The designer wanted some bold picture. The compromise was to inset several small ones and it worked beautifully.

Rodney's second book which contains a beautiful series of illustrations to classic children's stories like Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit and the Narnia series.

This was a book about Chris Achilleos' art techniques which gave us the chance to go into more depth with particular pictures than usually possible in collections of an artist's work. Such technique books were too popular at the time for it just to be aspiring fantasy artists who were collecting them, so it was an interesting phenomenon that puzzled even publishers at the time.

Heroic Dreams was a lovely assignment in which I was given free range of the Young Artist agency's (now Arena, I believe, on account of them not being so young any more) picture files and asked to come up with a loose theme to link them together. The book actually sold very well but years later I learned that many artists were not too happy about the deal because they only received a pittance for their contributions. Mind you, so did I, so there's no problem between us.

This was the first book Paper Tiger actually commissioned me for. Although I hoped it would lead to others, I'd no idea really how involved with PT I would later become. It started auspiciously, though. After working out roughly where he lived, I circled London on the nascent M25 and cut down through Epping Forest into the outskirts until I felt thoroughly lost, then I stopped to check the A to Z. Only to find that I happened to have stopped at the end of his road.

The book sold at least half a million copies, even by Paper Tiger's own accounts

Here is the very first Paper Tiger title I had a hand in. The cover shows a scene from an unpublished story Rodney and I were working on then.

While I tapped away at a typewriter, he was painting Heavy Metal Hero, a vast fantasy steam locomotive that is still one of my favourite paintings.