The Avon Fantasy Reader was an important Pulp reprint anthology (taking its contents from Weird Tales, Thrilling Wonder, The Blue Book, Adventure and Wonder Stories) that ran for eighteen issues from 1946 to 1952. It had a Science Fiction companion that ran for three issues before both were combined into The Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader for two more final issues. Edited by Donald A. Wolheim, it featured many Sword & Sorcery tales by Robert E. Howard and others. It also ran Cthulhu Mythos Horror and Space Opera style Science Fiction. For Complete Contents.
The covers for the series were also important, as they were some of the best Fantasy art to appear besides the original Pulps. In some case, better. Unfortunately we have almost no information on the earliest artists that did these covers, except one had the initials L. S. The early covers 1-4 have a Weird Tales feel with #1 looking like a Matt Fox image and 2-4 after A. R. Tilburne. The females on #5 and 6 are essentially the same image reversed, remind me of Margaret Brundage. With #8 the S&S images begin with art by M. Isip who illustrated the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories in Unknown, R. Crowl and Harry Barton. These will be over-shadowed by the work of Frank Frazetta in ten years but are striking if kind of cheesy. Only the name James Bama has achieved a fame of its own with Doc Savage paperbacks and Western art. Gray Morrow did two covers in the late 1960s when the series went to paperback. Appropriately, one cover is Space Opera and the other Sword & Sorcery.
The Avon Science Fiction Reader covers feature scantily clad ladies, just in case you thought SF might be all dry robots and scientists. The combined Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader covers take a weird turn, becoming very artsy and claiming to be “All New Stories”, so dropping the reprints and moving on. It wasn’t enough to save the magazine, disappearing about the same time as the Pulps that inspired it.
