Blog 2 of the Son of the Sun series.
You may have heard of Roger Dean, one of the very greatest album cover artists of all time. Well, back in 1976 Roger rang me and invited me over to London for a meeting with his new publishing company Dragon’s World/Paper Tiger. He was interested in publishing a book of some kind, related to my work with Celtic and Irish mythology, perhaps a collection, a look back, or maybe something new and original.
At that time, I was a huge fan of Roger Dean’s art. I still have an unopened copy of his art masterpiece cover for ‘Tales of Typographic Oceans’ by Yes. He made so many fine album covers for Yes and other bands, it would be crazy to pick out one or two but I would have to include another beautiful series of cover artworks Roger produced for the prog-rock band, Asia.
Before I had even met Roger Dean I had designed a cool new logo for Thin Lizzy’s ‘Nightlife’ that was clearly based on his work. I just loved his lettering style and this was a kind of backhanded tribute.
In the movie ‘Avatar’ by James Cameron, there are so many Roger Dean visual ripoffs I couldn’t even count them, including his famous ‘Floating Islands’ concept which was used extensively in the movie and every dragon and landscape was straight out of one of his books.
It is worth noting that he did sue James Cameron and the movie company for violating his copyright but lost the case for infringement in what I would have thought was a clear-cut case of copyright violation and theft. Yep, it’s ok to rip off a creative artist and his/ her life’s work now and pretend it did not happen.
I even took the floating islands theme into one of my paintings for my own book, ‘The Silver Arm’, published by Paper Tiger Books, the company founded by Roger Dean.
When I was asked to fly over to London to meet him back in 1976 I was delighted and it turned out he had seen my artwork via another extraordinary artist Alan Aldridge, an Englishman with a flair for graphic design and art who was as well-known back then as Roger Dean. Alan had set up an artist’s agency in London and had called me a few years earlier to join this new art agency, Alan Aldridge Associates.
Now with Roger Dean calling me to join his new venture, I was amazed at the interest in my artwork which I felt was still a bit primitive compared to these two recognized geniuses of 20th-century graphic design and art.
Before Roger had left the company he founded, he went thru his concept for my art for the new book. He wanted plenty of Celtic artwork which he clearly loved and a colour palette that was more subdued than my normal brightly coloured artwork for UK advertising campaigns via Alan Aldridge Associates.
Most importantly he gave me two little books on the art of the great Russian artist Ivan Bilibin and that was a real revelation. I already knew some of his artwork which I admired but these two little books were stunning and they influenced all the art for my own books and still do to this day.
I had already published a few portfolios and books of my own, including ‘Celtia’ which went to number one on the Irish bestseller lists a few years earlier. By the time I had negotiated my contract, it had gone from one book to a series of three. This was great, I actually had a story I was, I felt, destined to write and illustrate. I had a monthly advance now, enough to live on for a full year and in the middle of all this I had decided to move with my family to the USA once I had finished the text of this book I loosely titled ‘Conquests’.
I will not go into all the detail of the two years I spent researching musty volumes, translating old annals from Gaelic with the help of Dineen’s Irish dictionary here but will do so in another blog, many of the books mentioned in the previous blog were resources for these books. I actually enjoy all this so it was a real labour of love too.
Somehow amidst all this distraction I managed to stay focused and in three months of hard work, endless translations from Gaelic to English, and several rewrites the text was ready and that’s where I got my first taste of reality. I had written far too much. It needed serious editing to fit the written text into the allocated pages of the book.
The book was planned, as always, professionally, on a book plan grid that showed everyone, the publisher included what shape it would take. A second planner listed all the artworks to be finished and the timeline chart for the schedule and content for delivery to the publisher.
Next was the process of refining the text with editor Pat Vincent who was a university lecturer and an expert in Anglo Saxon literature. She helped greatly when it came to editing and shortening my text to fit into the allocated pages with the rest taken up by single-page and double-page paintings. All of this was going on at the same time I was busy making arrangements to sell my house in Ireland and move to the USA so it was a little chaotic and stressful.
The text was finished with Pat doing wonderful worked editing it so, I filled my cases with my valuable research books, shipped the rest in a 40-foot container, and off my family and I went to America. I was lucky when after a brief sojourn in New York, we had found a beautiful house to rent in Madison, Connecticut, not far from the sea. We loved it there, it was safe and peaceful but lily-white and conservative. It was paradise and every morning I jogged along the beach and even signed for a local Connecticut League soccer team but that too is another story for another day.
Back to the book. The first book of the planned trilogy was now titled ‘The Book of Conquests’ and it was ready to print. The first proofs arrived to me in the USA in the summer of 1977 and to be honest they were sub-par, washed out, and lacked impact I felt.
When I was told it was too late to correct any errors I was fuming, plus two double-page illustrations were switched by accident and looked out of place if the text was read, there were only a few typos but poor old Dineen, of Dineen’s Irish Dictionary fame, was misprinted as someone called ‘Oinsen’. Yep, welcome to the wonderful world of publishing. By the summer of 1978, the book was out and well-received, but the flaws were all still there annoying me and they still do to this day.
The first book, The Book of Conquests, was published in Europe in English and four other languages, and in the USA too by the then very prestigious New York imprint of Dutton & co, 2 Park Avenue, NY.
Despite my reservations about the print quality the book was well-received, got really superb reviews in the USA, UK, France, Holland, and Germany but not too good in Ireland where it got some pretty nasty, dismissive reviews.
One reviewer, I was told, simply dropped his review copy into the trash bin.
Since the book was successful everywhere else it really did not bother me until ‘In Dublin’ magazine gave it a one-line review by their resident graphic artist and it simply said:
‘Are you mad or what, Jim?’,
That pissed me off a bit so I took a half-page ad in that same magazine where I showed terrific reviews from ‘The Times Literary Supplement and the popular ‘Cosmopolitan’ magazine.
Below them, I added the dismissive ‘In Dublin’ one-liner.
Yep, that annoyed them but I admit I did enjoy having my say.
The book was doing superbly, selling well everywhere when Dutton, my American publishers, were taken over by another publishing house and suddenly things began to unravel.
They, the new company, immediately got rid of the US Dutton softback imprint, and next thing I knew my former bestseller was remaindered, along with every single title in this new, innovative range.
The word ‘Remaindered’ is the kiss of death for a publisher and what was really weird was that the remaindered copies were sold immediately to a worldwide book distributor and my book was sold out fast.
I even managed to get hold of about a hundred of them myself -which I later sold on my new website.
Finally, the very last first edition softbacks sold out on my website last year, bringing the story of ‘The Book of Conquests’ to a final end.
Between the jigs and the reels, myself and my family decided to return to Ireland as we were always very homesick and we could just about afford to change our minds despite the fact that we all now had those coveted ‘Green Cards’. At this point I was up to my neck with the next volume of the Conquests trilogy, titled ‘The Silver arm’ and in less than eighteen months I had the entire book ready for print after real backbreaking work, especially with the illustrations which I had made much more complex in style than the work for Conquests.
As with Conquests, there were disappointments with the colour repro and the missing colour printed inside covers which let down the look of the entire work. Aside from that, it was fine and again it sold really well.
The problem, as I discovered later, was not that the book was not selling but that there were very serious allegations from two other artists who had books with Paper Tiger that all was not above board. According to one of the artists affected it was alleged that our books were being run off in huge quantities in Singapore and the Far East and these print runs were not being included in royalties due to be paid to every artist and writer in the publisher’s stable.
Luckily, I had been paid a decent advance so it did not affect me immediately but any future royalties I depended on and had factored into my earnings simply vanished. Remember I had a family to feed. This was a near catastrophe but somehow I managed to survive and as usual, work through it all and get back to earning enough to look after them all.
Within a year or so, these lurid allegations of impropriety were beginning to be taken seriously by others, and by coincidence Paper Tiger books were closed down, sold to yet another publisher, leaving me owed thousands in unpaid royalties for both books. The harsh reality is that the new UK publishers had no interest in my books, just sold them on, and legally had no obligation to pay me any of the many thousands owed.
I was still contracted to do a third volume, ‘The Son of the Sun’, and my contract was sold to another less interested publisher who never paid me a red cent so there was no way they were getting the third volume.
There is something desperately wrong with the world when a publisher can go bust, sell on the business, and all the published and unpublished titles to another publisher, without even informing its roster of artists and writers, and the new publisher gets all the copyrights and has absolutely no legal obligation to repay unpaid royalties.
I was so angry at the way it all went that I resolved never to allow anyone ever to publish my books again and as a direct consequence I abandoned the final volume in this trilogy after getting about a quarter of the text finished. It was some of my best writing too so it was pretty devastating to have to walk away from this dream of mine to tell the wonderful story of the earliest inhabitants of this island of Ireland and bring it to a worldwide audience.
But I do I have to be honest too, I am extremely grateful that the first two volumes actually made it to print, my two books were translated to five different languages and sold worldwide, something which I would have found impossible to do at that time, before the wonder that is the internet, opening my work up to a massive worldwide audience which includes many of you.
You win some, you lose some.
The good news is always welcome but often the bad news is not all bad. For me, there’s always that little chink of light I can follow and through it, I find my way forward.
That’s why it is now time to at least finish the text and story of the final volume. Let’s see if I last long enough to actually do a few new paintings for it too.