Marginalia

[shewhomust]

Things I came across while putting together the previous post, but which really don't fit into that post:

1. One reason why I couldn't immediately place A Chance Child is that the internet offered me images of a current edition, whose cover I didn't recognise. But when I took my own copy from the shelf, its cover, too, was disconcerting:
   
   
   
   Exhibit A: A Chance Child appears to have been painted with the book in mind: the three children, the waterway, the industrial revolution era bridge... That's actually the Iron Bridge itself, too grand and too high above the river gorge, but that wasn't what bothered me. The boy in front, that level gaze, didn't I recognise him? Well, yes, I did.
   
   
   
   Exhibit B: Eight Days of Luke. Not the same image, as I had thought at first, but same model and same artist. So not quite as odd as I had thought, but now I wanted to know more about the artist, Maggie Heslop, and the internet doesn't want to tell me anything about her. It does, however, come up with some more covers, specifically:
   
   
   
   Exhibit C: The Time of the Ghost. And this time, I'm not so sure that one of those children isn't the same image...
   
   ETA Maggie Heslop also provides the cover of my (Puffin) edition of The Ogre Downstairs, which is surely very specific to the book itself...



2. Talking about Diana Wynne Jones, she, too, was a winner of the Phoenix Award (for Howl's Moving Castle. Fire and Hemlock was an 'Honor Book', which I interpret as runner-up). Peter Dickinson another winner (twice, in fact) and his acceptance speeches are online. Here he is talking about the writing of The Seventh Raven (I note in passing - in the margins of these marginalia - that if you ask an author "Where do you get your ideas from?" they - and everyone else - will mock you. But if you ask them "Where did you get the idea for this book from?" they will tell you, often at some length.):
   

   If only I could have found a way of developing the story so that the ideas simply permeated the whole structure, like the veins of gold in a mountain, which had seeped in among the rock when everything was liquid in the heat of creation, and set there, for my readers, with luck, to notice the glint of an idea in the surface and then themselves mine into the mass and discover the wealth beneath. That is, of course, the unobtainable ideal...

   
   

ETA comment left anonymously on LJ with title Maggie Heslop and Michael Heslop: I've been trying to figure out these two artists since 1988. Lol.

The cover of The Dark is Rising Omnibus (Puffin Books) features illustrations by Michael Heslop who also illustrated the individual Puffin editions of Cooper's books.

The art on the cover of The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones (MacMillan) is by Maggie Heslop.

However, a portion of the DIR cover and a portion of the backcover of TotG look identical, as if done by the same artist.

I recently discovered that Maggie and Michael were married, but are now divorced. They seem to have a remarkably similar style and in the case of the covers mentioned above, it's almost like one reproduced an image drawn by the other. I wonder if I will ever get an answer to this mystery.