There used to be this ugly looking cedar or pine slatted shelf in a house I lived in when I was really young. On the bottom shelf there were was a stack of these magazines that had the most otherworldly, weird covers to them of smooth, blue skinned aliens on bizarre looking hovercrafts racing over strange, sponge-like looking worlds — obviously on their way to drop a lot of “space acid” and go to Giorgio Moroder’s intergalactic tour stop at the Zero G Cyber-Arena on the planet Zarxxon Nataxxia 5.

I clipped a bunch of those weird images out and had them pasted in weird notebooks or as random pieces of art stuck to the wall over my desk. Then I moved onto posting gig posters and weird people rocking out on my wall.

Lately I’ve been running into this “artform” again — first to get some typography ideas for a musical project I’ve been working on and the other by sheer chance that I keep running into 70′s editions of Piers Anthony (and a myriad of similar authors) at the Dalston Oxfam (charity shop) in East London. Some of the story lines in these books can be fruity and too close to being at a sci-fi convention but I’ve been mainly picking up copies just for the fantastic artwork on the covers.

Below is a goldmine of scans of covers of books. films, and promotional posters that I’ve found — most of them namely from two Flickr accounts: Eric Carl and Hangfire Books — giving them credit for all the hard scanning work they’ve done. These works, of course, have all of the regular copyrights applied where, um, applicable.