Finally Appreciating Leo and Diane Dillon

At various times, I've written about the illustrators of children's and young adult or chapter book covers that I love (such as Trina Schart Hyman, Richard Cuffari, Emanuel Schongut, Alan Cober, Virginia Lee Burton, or Ellen Raskin). One influential pair of illustrators I've long known about but never loved quite as much was Leo and Diane Dillon.

It's not that I didn't like their work, but it was almost too ubiquitous from the 1970s on, and some of it I found a bit mushy, maybe too airbrushed for my taste. A lot of it is beautiful, though, and now (searching around as I started to write this post) I found that some of their work I didn't even realize was theirs.

I got started on this because Cory Doctorow tweeted this startling piece of theirs from 1970:

It was used on this cover:

Here are some other cover illustrations from that same early-1970s era, which are not very similar to the works they are mostly known for in the children's book world:

I mostly knew about them back in the 1970s because of their woodcut illustrations on these covers for books by Erik Christian Haugaard:

1963

1965

1968 (I may never forgive the designer of Rider for those typeface and color choices.) 

1971

This cover for a John Christopher novel published in 1963, which I don't think I've ever heard of before, looks like a cross between these two styles: 

It's not a woodcut, though you can see elements of woodcut style in the rendering, but it also shows the beginnings of the expressionist psychedelia so clearly shown in the 1970ish science fiction covers.

Something else I learned today (or had forgotten) was that the Dillons did this original hardcover illustration for Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and also did illustrations for reissues of A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door that were published at the same time. (Illustrator trivia: Richard Cuffari did the original cover of Wind, and Ellen Raskin did the original Wrinkle cover.)

I also learned that the Dillons did an Ace paperback cover for Ursula LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea that I've never seen before:

Pretty cool.