In the book “Reflections: The Art Of Stephen Bradbury” published by Paper Tiger in 1996 can be found the original artwork for the covers for “The Saga of the Exiles” series where Stephen tells of his meeting with Gary Day-Ellison and how lucky he was to get the commission as it was Friday and “Gary didn’t see anybody on a Friday” His obvious disappointment softened the secretary’s heart, he had five minutes to show his portfolio anf the rest is history as they say. After the “Exiles” covers he went on to do the four covers in the “Galactic Milieu” series, namely “Intervention”, “Jack the Bodiless”, “Diamond Mask” and “Magnificat” The eight covers are linked in that the angel in “Magnificat” metamorphoses back into the skull on the cover of “The Many Coloured Land”
I have now added several more covers of various dates to my original Julian May PAN Books page including some of the American titles Stephen mentioned saying “If you see the American covers for the same series, they are a bit cringeworthy” Dare I say I quite like some of them especially “Adversary” from 1983. It is also interesting to see the later PAN editions from 1994 onwards where the artwork is spoilt by being squashed to fit a format for which they were not intended.