Over at the Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog we see a collection of "Worlds of IF" covers from the 1950′s and the 1960′s, by a smorgasbord of illustrators including a few by Virgil Finlay, and what seems to be a posthumously published cover by Hannes Bok.

In fact I wasn’t positive that the publication date was, you know, after Bok’s expiration date, and when I went looking to verify that I ran across this small archive of his work. It includes the one I’ve reproduced below.

Frederik Pohl posted some of his reminiscences about Bok last year. You can read those here and here.

The 50′s and 60′s are actually a little too modern for me, for the most part, but I’m always ready for a little Finlay or a bit of Bok. I’m often bemused by the fact that the long, odd trip I’ve taken with my own work has led me back – by a route that’s anything but direct, and which couldn’t be called intentional – to illustrators like these, whose work I enjoyed so very much when I was young. It’s all a bit like a joke that I wasn’t in on, or the end result of a convoluted plan by some cackling archvillain.