hello michael -a name from the past

[Anonymous]

Hello Michael! It's John Collier-I did the Elric map illos. for the DAW books lo these many years ago. Well it has been awhile-25 years or so? Still have all your letters tucked away at home and have remained a faithful reader all this time.

Just wanted to touch base and say "hello" as well as"thank you" for giving a young untried illustrator a chance many years ago. You helped me at a critical time in my life. I should have thanked you properly years ago.

Thank you also for continuing the credit line thru all the map's various incarnations. My kids get a kick out of it. Now that I've found this site I hope to speak with you more often.

Trust all is well with you and yours-still not sure how you ended up in Texas(?) but this site looks like it has the answer somewhere.

Thanks again Michael- for so many things
Regards,
John Collier

[duggm]

Hi John. Welcome aboard!

Are the maps on the web? If so, could you provide a link?

[Mikey_C]

Plus a reminder that our main man is on his travels at present, so may not be able to reply for a few weeks. Nice to have you here! :D

[Beezus]

hello

Hello folks- thanks for the welcome. As far as I know the maps are not posted anywhere on the web. Perhaps in the future I will dig out the originals and scan them and try to figure out how to post them. They were collected (along with a ton of other wonderful maps) in "An Atlas of Fantasy" by J.B Post (he was the map librarian for the Free Library of Philadelphia and if memory serves me the library has a large fantasy map collection. The book was published in a revised edition by Ballantine with an intro. by Lester del Rey. The book was published in June 1979. ISBN 0-345-27399-0. To the best of my knowledge it has never been reprinted.
I got into the map thing because (well let's just say it) I wasn't the world's best illustrator-but I was fascinated by the worlds that Michael created. Michael was a little leery of the whole "map" idea-why make things that concrete-but he indulged me. Besides I was really just building on the work that the fantastic Illustrator Jack Gaughan had started in a S&S anthology- Fantasic Swordsmen.

[Clangador]

I have "An Atlas of Fantasy" and it's a great book. I've always liked maps. Also, the first Elric books I read were the ones with you map illustration in them, so your rendering of Elric's world has always been my favorite.

[Beezus]

Thanks for the kind words Clangador. Glad you liked them. They were a lot of fun to do. I just fell in love with his place names-Pan Tang, R'lin K'ren A'a, Myrrhyn,Tanelorn. Hwamgaarl probably being my favorite. I couldn't pronounce them 30 years and I probably can't pronounce them now, but they are all so evocative. You could get a real sense of Elric's world from those names.
As a "newbie" here I have enjoyed reading different threads and am glad to see the EC cycle has picked up so many new fans over the years. In fact I'm jealous in some ways because for those of you just beginning the journey-it's a wonderful ride and it's all new. What's better than cracking a new book and letting yourself be swept away? Clangador-I suspect that you and I have taken the path thru the cycle more than once and still find something fresh and new with each rereading. It's always good to visit old friends.

[Marca]

I spotted this thread while doing a search and thought I'd resurrect it, as I missed it first time round. Interesting to hear from John, I always liked his map in the DAW Elric books, although normally that kind of thing doesn't bother me in fantasy books. Like Mike, I'm a big fan of the DAW editions of his work, I think they had a lot of love and care put into them. By the way, the maps appear to be missing from the UK Grafton reprints for some reason.

John, are you still there? Come back and post some more

[Anonymous]

Hello again

Aral- Hello. John Collier aka Beezus here. My first reply to this was "eaten" by cyber space-so I hope I'm not repeating myself should it find it's way on-line. I've been "lurking" here as it were-just trying to play catch-up. Have really been enjoying the Photoshop work on the various actors who might portray Elric. Great stuff. What a creative group of people.

Thanks for the kind words regarding the DAW editions. They WERE done with a lot of love-I remember torturing myself over what side of the Zaphra-Trepek River the city of Iosaz (I think) should be placed! A small detail I realize now-I doubt-I KNOW now- that Mike could have cared less-it smacks of "world building" and Mikes' landscape is much more a function of interior state of mind than actual geography. But at the time it was an interesting exercise and helped me to plot the movement of my favorite character across his world. And in a very real sense,it helped me plot my awkward way thru this world.

A few words about DAW in the early 70s. It was an exciting place to visit. I only visited a few times to drop off stuff but there was a real buzz there. They seemed really committed to what they were doing. Mr. Wollheim was a great man on many,many levels. All this great cover art laying around. Mr. Wollheim showed me a original Norman Rockwell he had stashed in a closet. OK so it was a portrait of Richard Nixon-not my choice of subject matter- but it was a REAL Rockwell-right next to a REAL Mike Whelan. I was in heaven. And I was there all because Mike was kind enough to take a chance on some kid who worked up enough courage to hop on an elevator with him and his agent at a Science Fiction convention in New York. I doubt I ever sweated that much in my young life. Nervous beyond nervous. But Mike was so-so normal and actually liked (sort of) what I showed him.

I still have my letters from Mike we used to exchange before the rise of the internet-and I wander off into the land of advertising. How cool was it to be corresponding with your favorite writer! How wonderful is this site to be able to exchange ideas,thoughts,etc. at the push of a button. Alright, I'm gushing.

I will try to contribute more-I have been slowly scanning some things the group may find interesting. Thanks again for the kind words. And thank you Mike for giving yourself so freely to your fans. And so much more.

[Marca]

Very glad you're still visiting the site John. Good to hear from you again. I'm sure everybody here would be interested in hearing any further memories of your work with DAW. Did you ever meet Michael Whelan? I look forward to those scans when you're able to put them up.

[Michael Moorcock]

Very nice to hear from you John.
Your map was uncannily like the one I drew for myself and which Jim Cawthorn did for our private use. I thought that map appeared in one of the UK books, but it could be a false memory. I wouldn't like people to think I never used maps -- I did. Hawkmoon, of course, was the easiest. I just needed a map of Europe. Similarly with Corum, I made it Western England when the Scilly Islands were still attached to the mainland. Places like Michael's Mount in Cornwall and a lot of Cornish/Celtic names.

Grafton never took much trouble with the editions. They reached a point where I had to step in and start demanding better and more pertinent covers. The last Grafton edition of Revenge of the Rose would have been utterly horrible if I hadn't insisted on getting in touch with Robert Gould and commissioning a new cover myself. To be fair to him, the editor, Malcolm Edwards, reckoned the cover sold a lot more copies than the one they had been going to use.
The map will appear again, in an EARLIER form, when Walter Simonson delivers the third episode of our Elric story to DC.
All maps are based on the Collier/Cawthorn map, even when not credited. I seem to recall the ones done for the Chaosium board games aren't credited.
Somewhere out there I wouldn't be surprised if my original Elric map doesn't exist. It might be at the Bodliean, or in private hands, like the manuscripts of the early Elric stories. I had a habit of throwing everything in a big box once I was done with it and then sending the boxes to the annual British sf convention to be auctioned on behalf of TAFF (the Transatlantic Fan Fund, which sent a British fan to an American convention one year, and an American fan to a British convention the other -- this was in the days when air travel was beyond the pockets of most ordinary people).

[Whiskers]

John,

Thanks for the story. I wanted to let you know that it's very simple (if time consuming) to upload images. If you go to http://www.multiverse.org/imagehive/v/misc/album58/ you'll find instructions on how to upload them. If you have a large volume of images to upload, we can further accomodate you. Please be as decriptive in your captions as possible.

You can start as soon as you like. :lol:

[Beezus]

Maps

Hello Mike,et al- Your mention of the Chaosium map jogged my memory as to why it was uncredited.
They had contacted me about wanting to use the Elric map (we are going back here a bit in time) ,but didn't have any money to pay for anything and besides they were going to redraw it to correct some errors-so would I mind if they did all that?
Well I never really considered the map "mine" to begin with. It's really all yours-so I said yes-But-should there be any moneys available please donate it Mike's favorite charity and just send me some proof that you did that. Well needless to say I never heard from them again. But just out of curiousity-do you remember if they ever did that?
Thanks for the heads up on the next appearance of the map-I look forward to seeing it. Walter Simonson is great-isn't he?
I guess I could just google this next question,but does Jim Cawthorn have a website? I'd like to drop him a note.
Regards,
John

[Michael Moorcock]

Chaosium are notorious not just for not paying me, but for not paying many of their contributors. So join the gang, as it were.
Jim doesn't have a website but you can find him well represented on the Savoy Books site. It shouldn't be hard to find. They reproduce quite a lot of his work, along with their own Lord Horror stuff. I suppose you could call them my favourite publisher.

[Beezus]

Savoy Books/Colin Mackay

God-I have really been out of touch too long-the Savoy Book site is fantastic. Thanks for the heads up. Time to make a serious dent in the wallet.
On another topic altogether, have you ever read anything by the late Scottish writer, Colin Mackay? Song of the Forest remains one of my favorites. Lots of echoes in there. Just seems like someone you would be familiar with. Any other Colin Mackay fans out there?

[Marca]

Although John's map was missing from the UK Grafton editions, I noticed that it appears in the Fantasy Masterworks Elric edition that I saw in the shops the other day (and is in a slightly bigger form than the DAW version since the book is trade paperback format).