Ronald Clyne
| Ronald Clyne | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Ronald Clyne December 28, 1925 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Died | 2006 |
| Occupation | designer, graphic artist |
| Years active | 1945–2006 |
Ronald Clyne (December 28, 1925 – 2006) was an American freelance designer and graphic artist best known for creating over 500 covers for Folkways Records during the more than three-decade lifetime of his independent company from 1948–1986.
After beginning to draw at the age of 8, Clyne sold his first drawing at the age of 15 to Ray Palmer of Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories. It was published in the November 1941 issue of Fantastic Adventures. This led him to doing cover art for several fanzines of the era, such as Bob Tucker’s Le Zombie, and Al Ashley’s Nova. A few years later, he would do work for Fan Slants, Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Fanvariety and a great number of other fantasy and horror books and magazines - prominent amongst them being “The Arkham Sampler”.
Clyne's first published book jacket illustration was for Jack Snow's collection Dark Music and Other Spectral Tales (1947). This jacket originally had Ray Bradbury's name printed on the lower panel beneath the art, as Bradbury was to have provided a foreword, but after Bradbury reneged (due to the publisher insisting on including material by Snow which was juvenilia that Bradbury considered "patently unpublishable"), a bar of ink was printed over Bradbury's name on all the jackets, which had already been printed.
Clyne designed a number book jackets for August Derleth's Arkham House during the first two decades of that publisher's history.
In the early years of Folkways Records (1948), founder Moses Asch felt that the cover designs should marry with the recorded sound, and they differed from those of other commercial record labels. They use only two-colour printing on matt paper glued over a thick matt black cardboard sleeve - always leaving a thin black line around the cover’s edge. Artists that contributed to the overall style of Folkways records were Irwin Rosenhouse, David Stone Martin and Craig Mierop. However Clyne’s singular use of typography, layout and image was to be most often used and he was inspired by portrait photos given to him by Asch, and images that he would source during regular visits to the New York Public Library and National Archive.
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