I received the information that the artwork on the Titan Books' cover of The Peerless Peer, the part in the upper right corner of Tarzan and the lion, was done by Clinton Pettee.
Clinton's art was used as the cover for The All-Story, October 1912, illustrating Edgar Rice Burroughs' story "Tarzan of the Apes" (see here).


The central part of this illustration has been used on the cover of The Peerless Peer.
Thanks Willem.

Philip José Farmer in his foreword to the story "The Shadow of Space": «"My little old maiden aunt in Iowa won't understand this," Gene Roddenberry said. "It'd be too far out for her. Besides, do you have any idea how much money it would cost to do the special effects and make all the models we'd need?" Roddenberry, the producer of the soon-to-be-launched Star Trek series, and I were in his office. He had just read my treatment for a script .... "It's out, definitely out. Not for me," Roddenberry said ... Now, looking back, I can see that he was right. The idea of a faster-than-light spaceship expanding until it burst out of our universe would be too far out for most TV viewers, At that time anyway.»


So, Farmer used the idea of the treatment for a story. The first version of this was rejected by an editor, –by Joe Elder for his anthology Eros in Orbit– reason why Farmer rewrote some (erotic) part of it. It then got published in the magazine If (1967), and saw many publications after the first one.

I love good cover art on SF books. It is for that reason also that I want to give credit to the artists who did the paintings. Alas, not all the book publishers do give a  solid or clear credit to the cover artist.
Sometimes it can be deduced from a signature in the painting. In other cases I'm able to recognize the artist's work and check one of the many art books in my collection or the sources online if I'm correct.

Sphere Books (UK) published in 1970 the first three books of the World of Tiers series: Maker of Universes, The Gates of Creation, and A Private Cosmos. The artist of the three surrealistic and somewhat psychedelic covers was not credited.


The Galactic Central bibliography, Philip José Farmer: Good-Natured Ground Breaker, by Phil Stephensen-Payne, and Gordon Benson Jr. credited the paintings to Melvyn (Melvyn Grant) with two of the covers. I never questioned it, and took over the names in my bibliography.

We were wrong as it proofs. Because of a question by Michael Hutchins, moderator at the ISFDB, if I was sure about Melvyn doing the covers, I began to doubt. I could not proof he did these. Melvyn's work of the same time looks pretty different. I wrote Melvyn Grant an email and in his answer he denies doing these paintings. He did some paintings for later editions of the same novels from Sphere Books, but not these.

In my research another artist's name popped up, Bill Botten. He did several, similar covers in 1970 for Sphere Books. On his website he even claimed the painting for The Gates of Creation, but not of the other two. I wrote Bill also an email, if he could confirm to be the artist of the three paintings. His apology came soon, he had made a mistake by including the cover of Gates. This was not by him, and he immediately removed it from his list of covers.
Bill Botten was art director at Sphere Books at the time, but he doesn't know who did the covers because as he wrote "it is so long ago that my memory will not stretch that far back".

The discussed covers are now corrected and credited to 'unknown'. If any of you knows the painter...?

Already the ninth Farmer reissue from Titan Books (UK), the novel Flesh (1960, rewritten 1968). It got some pretty good reviews with the previous editions:

«Farmer must have had lots of fun writing this because I had quite a bit reading it. (Tony Lewis)»

«For a book that was written nearly half a century ago, on the other side of the so-called Sexual Revolution, it still works well as a satire of sex, religion, and politics. (Mondo Ernesto )»


But the novel also received less enthusiastic reviews, for instance:

«There are vivid flashes of imagination that no one but Philip Farmer could even come near, but even so, it isn’t a good book. (Joanna Russ)».

Both the authors of the two Afterwords in the book, Dennis E. Power and Michael A. Baron, think otherwise and explain this to the readers in very interesting essays.
I have said it before, but the extra material, often very interesting and enlightning, in the editions of Titan Books, make the books even more worth buying.