Attentive people will notice that the covers of all nine of my books were done by the same man, John Blumen, a very talented commercial artist and illustrator. And also my oldest friend.
John and I met in junior high school, and although we were in the same home room and sat quite literally beside each other, we never talked. Both of us were shy by nature and crushed down by all the weights of being 9th graders. That changed one day when morning announcements congratulated John for an award for building a model of the USS CONSTITUTION from scratch, something almost everyone just shrugged off as meaningless. However, I was a huge fan of ships and fancied myself an expert on the CONSTITUTION, and I was both intrigued and skeptical of John’s achievement. We always talk dismissively of “Spanish galleons” – cheap renderings of a sailing ship with no details for casual decoration – and I was afraid John had made one of these horrors for the sacred frigate from the War of 1812.
I asked him about it, and he generously took me to his house to see the model. I was flabbergasted. It was absolutely perfect. I could have told you the number of guns (rated at 44 with 52 actual), their size (24 pounder long guns with bow and stern chasers fore and aft), and the hull design (rake-decked), but as for the rigging, all I knew were the names of the masts. John had it down to the ropes and halyards that worked the sails, and he had built all this from scratch (with parts supplied by a small kit). Years later, he repeated this achievement with an amazing model of the Swedish ship-of-the-line VASA which had the distinctions of being the biggest and most beautiful ship in all the world at the time of her commissioning and which keeled over and sank on its first attempt to cross a quiet harbor. John has always had a wonderful appreciation for the ironic.
Our professional lives diverged after high school. I pursued authorship of the Great American Novel with a long side-trip through powder metallurgy, while John began to establish himself as a credible artist/illustrator (the term “fine artist” is not a title John aspires to). But our friendship continued with me regularly visiting his growing family (in the 80s, I would bring my high tech VCR to their house for movie nights for kids and adults), and we never tired of cards and games (John designed a board game called Jihad which was Risk with serious attitude). All this time, his portfolio was expanding exponentially with commercial art, book covers, and even a set of tarot cards, anything and everything that required an illustration, and his skills were growing in lockstep with his experience.
From the completion of my first book in the late 70s (an unnamed monstrosity that has fortunately been lost to time), I have wanted John to do the illustrations for the cover of my books. John, with a great deal of experience in the corporate world of artistic design, quietly assured me that publishing houses had their own staff of in-house artists who would be assigned any and all cover art, and he was both amused and touched by my persistence and naiveté. That determination, however, finally paid off in 2011 with the publication of A Rage in the Heavens on Amazon where I had the say in the cover art. My agent at the time who was overseeing uploading of the work was highly skeptical – childhood friend to do the cover art? – but once he saw examples of John’s work, he reluctantly agreed to give him a chance. And once he saw the final cover, he was a convert.
Yes, it’s easy to think there is more than a touch of nepotism in my choice of John as my illustrator, but this misses several very important points. John and I know each other and communicate well, able to honestly and openly discuss items related to the covers without (much) antagonism. This is particularly important as we learned the hard truths about cover art (the quality of the work is secondary to composition and function) and when I had to rely on him to quickly switch between formats when I was in the middle of uploading the manuscripts (Epub, PDF, mobi, even after 9 books, I’m still not clear on the differences). But most of all, I love his art. A key tying all these diverse works together is the style and quality of the artwork, and I feel people looking down a list of titles might well be able to pick out a Hillebrecht book by the “brushstrokes” of the cover. I am immensely proud of having John as my illustrator and even more as my friend of more than 50 years.
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