Paperback Cover Rates: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

In case I've left you with the impression that the end of the Golden Age of magazine illustration meant that there was no call for illustration after 1960 -- and that all the great magazine artists of the mid-20th century either moved out west or became photographers -- well, nothing could be further from the truth.



Although their traditional market was never again the same, a new market for illustration - especially 'realistic' illustration - was growing by leaps and bounds: paperback cover art. And that market had an almost insatiable appetite for new illustrations.



Even in the early 1950s, the paperback publishers were putting 1,200 new titles on the stands each year, according to a 1953 Fortune magazine article. That's 1,200 new illustration assignments per year, and the numbers only got bigger a decade later.



No surprise then that quite a few magazine illustrators had already made paperback cover art a regular part of their income during the '50s (and some even during the '40s).



In "The Book of Paperbacks" author Piet Schreuders documents the pay rates for cover art over this period. "The normal fee for a single cover was $100 - 125 around 1945," writes Schreuders.



"In the '50s, prices ranges from $200 to $250, although the really big names (Avati at Signet, Tom Dunn at Pocket Books, Ben Stahl at Bantam) received $500 - $1,000."



What's so interesting for me about that statement is that there were a few - not many, but a few - illustrators in the paperback market of the 1950s who could make as much per painting as they would doing mainstream magazine illustration.

For the others (the majority) the price Schreuders documents jibes well with what Mitchell Hooks described to me when I interviewed him a few years ago. Mitchell told me that covers went for about $300 when he began painting them in the early 50's...



... and that as a member of the Graphic Artists Guild he worked to encourage publishers to pay better rates. After a few years, the average cover was going for $800.



In a small press publication from 1988 called "Paperback Parade," Hooks told interviewer/editor Gary Lovisi, "I sure never got rich doing covers, but it paid the rent."



Continued Hooks, "For about 15 or 20 years that's all I did. There wasn't much other work around."



When I asked Harry Borgman about his experience in paperback cover art he wrote back, "I did a few paperbacks from 1965 to 1973, probably a total of 12 or 15. For most of them I was paid $900, the first ones were a bit lower."



And Will Davies, with whom I shared studio space in Toronto, did over 500 covers for Harlequin Romance over the course of a quarter century. When Will began painting them in the early '70s "they started out at about $800 or $900 but gradually we got the price up to where it ought to have been: around $2,500 each."



Will did two or three covers a month - every month. That's not a bad gig if you can get regular assignments like Will did.



Original illustration art dealer, Mitch Itkowitz represents the work of many artists who did paperback covers. Mitch told me, "I think Max Ginsburg, back when he was still in the PB market, wanted to sell his cover paintings for what he was paid. At that time, in the late 80's/early 90's, it was in the $2000-2500 range."



And when I previously wrote about paperback cover rates in 2008, I asked my friend René Milot how much he has been paid in recent years for book covers.



René told me that he had received as much as $5,000 for a cover from a major publisher... but that price had actually dropped in recent years. As of that writing, $2,500 once again was more typical.

But here's the fascinating thing: if we take $2,500 and, with the help of our handy online calculator, reverse-adjust it for inflation into 1950s dollars, it comes to...



... Mitchell Hooks' $300 cover rate from 1952.



* Many thanks to Mitch Itkowitz for the Mitchell Hooks original art scan directly above. This piece is currently available at graphiccollectibles.com

* Many thanks to my Flickr friend, Uilke (AKA UK Vintage) for allowing me to use many of his cover scans in today's post. Visit Uilke's Flickr archives to see thousands of stunning vintage paperback covers