Barbara Remington, the artist responsible for the best-known covers of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books, has died at 90, the New York Times reports.
Remington died of breast cancer last month, a friend told the newspaper.
Her covers for Tolkien’s fantasy series are probably the most iconic of all of the versions. Her art adorned the paperback versions of the novels published in the 1960s by Ballantine Books.
Remarkably, Remington hadn’t read the books before she did the cover art for them.
“I didn’t know what they were about,” she said. “I tried finding people that had read them, but the books were not readily available in the States, and so I had sketchy information at best.”
“If I’d had the time to actually read the books first, which was my habit to do, I’d have definitely drawn different pictures,” she said in an interview with Andwerve. “After reading his work, I was in awe of Tolkien. I knew there was something special about him.”
Remington had other connections to the world of literature. She was friends with poets Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, and Gregory Corso.
“I remember one time where we were all in a room, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Peter Orlovsky, and a musician friend named Denise,” she said. “We were all sitting together smoking a joint, and Allen Ginsberg was quoting Bob Dylan lyrics. Right now that memory seems rather surreal, but it happened.”
Michael Schaub is an Austin, Texas–based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
