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An ominous cover with a long Gothic corridor, mist, statues, ravens, and an astronaut.

Shall These Bones Breathe?

Within a hand-drawn wooden frame carven with leaves and vines is a piece of parchment bearing the title Exploring the Lord of the Rings Volume I and at the bottom the name of our author, Corey Olsen. Between title and name is another beautifully drawn scene all in wood colors: on a bit of oaken table, behind a small thick mat, a round picture is posed on its edge. The picture itself has a circular frame, rubbed smooth with a bit of crasftsman-style trapezoid carving at the top and each side. The frame seems to be oak as well, but the picture within is drawn as though it is a hundred, two hundred intricate inlays of ebony, birch, pine, maple, mahogany, just a painstaking masterpiece made with love. This picture is of the road leading away, drawing us ever onward, first past lovely flowers in a meadow, then through rolling fields, past an ancient willow tree, over a bridge, past mounded hobbit holes—or are they barrows? The terrain becomes rougher in the distance, and after a pass between two light, old, rounded mountains, the ranges in the distance are black, jagged, and foreboding. The sky is dark except at the horizon, and shows a handful of scattered stars and a crescent moon that looks new. But wait! the curve of the moon is upward to the right, yet there are stars in that direction, not sun; this could only be a moment of lunar eclipse, a time of possibility and wonder.

Exploring the Lord of the Rings – Volume I

The cover art is a broken Greek statue.

Fallible Aesthetics

The Flower of the Cedar

A translucent white banner with deckle edges reads “A Waiter Made of Glass: Stories and Poems.” A smaller similar banner shares the name of our author, Verlyn Flieger. The scene behind and between these banners has been painted of a charming old world downtown street at sundown. The sky is gold and salmon blending to a soft middle blue above. The street is clean, with tall buildings side-by-side. They look like businesses below with residences above. Warm indoor light streams out of rectangular windows and arched doorways which spills across the flagstone sidewalks and warmly colored street surface. A lovely spired building in the background suggests a stone church at the end of the street. No people, not pedestrian, nor shopkeeper, nor even a person peeping out of a window can be seen. At the center of this eerily quiet scene stands a wooden round pedestal table with four red upholstered spindle-legged chairs. The table is laid for four with triangularly-folded white napkins and a spoon at each place. Who is expected at this silent meal, and by whom? The artist’s signature, E. Austin, is written small in the bottom left corner.

A Waiter Made of Glass: Stories and Poems

A translucent white rectangle near the top of this cover declares the title, Exploring Beowulf. A thin red line just inside the edge of that rectangle further defines the shape. The Signum Press eagle hunting with talons out before the sun, rendered as simple black line and white figures, decorates the top left corner of this rectangle. The bottom of the cover has a red rectangle reaching to the left, bottom, and right edges with white words declaring “Audio Series by Prof. Michael D. C. Drout, PhD.” Above this red rectangle is a beautiful drawing of three weapons on a worn and well-oiled leather surface. We see, lying on the leather diagonally from lower left toward upper right, the broad tip of a spear, the blade of a sword, and the hilt of another sword. The metal of the spear tip and the sword is pattern-welded: the master weaponsmith folded and re-folded this metal over and over for strength and resilience. The distinctive folding lines of the metal suggests Beowulf’s own wægsweord (line 1489a), a wave-sword. The hilt could be a European Migration Period sword with a well-oiled simple crossguard and a pommel which bears some simple, striking grooves decorating the bell-curve shape. The tang is covered by a grip of something light-colored—it could be bleached leather or even bone—secured by bronze flanges decorated by tiny dots along their grip edges and tiny triangles with crosses inside along the edges toward the crossguard and pommel. The grip itself is absolutely beautiful, bearing a red-inked sun symbol (a circle with an inner eight-pointed star, from which extend four pairs of rays in four cardinal directions) and a dark blue-inked Valknut (a tricursal knot of three interlinked triangles). These are not show pieces. The light grip of the hilt shows wear and smudges of old dirt, although the weapons are clearly well cared for.

Exploring Beowulf