While I have referenced the British editions of I Am Legend from Corgi in a prior post, I have not yet featured any of those in this series, an oversight I will correct today.
Corgi (Look for the Corgi dog — your guarantee of quality) released the first British edition of the novel in 1956, two years after its debut from Gold Medal in the US, and a year after their neighbors to the South released the first foreign translation.
The first edition cover art, by John Richards, would introduce a concept that would carry over much more prominently in the next several Corgi reprints: a staked woman — possibly Neville's wife, Virginia:
While at first glance the covers to these 1960 and 1962 editions appear to be the same painting (artist unknown), upon closer examination it is easy to spot differences in the details. It's not clear if it's actually the same artwork painted over, or a completely different painting. In one of my greatest I Am Legend regrets, I did not take advantage of an opportunity to purchase the cover painting for the 1962 paperback (underneath which may have been the painting on the left) for what now seems to be a paltry sum of $1200. In the early days of the internet, well before eBay and Amazon, it was listed for sale by a UK seller in a bookselling forum (along with a copy of the book). I held out thinking the price might eventually be reduced; unfortunately it sold before that ever happened (after which I developed an appreciation for the difference between can I afford to and can I afford NOT to). It's particularly painful in that I imagine a closer inspection of the original artwork might have answered this long-standing question (one that I was completely unaware of at the time, having not yet acquired — or even seen — a copy of the 1960 paperback). I hope that someday the artwork will turn up on again the secondary market, even though the chances of it selling at a similar price are highly unlikely.
It's also worth pointing out that two years prior to this cover, John Richards painted the cover to the Creature from the Black Lagoon novelization!
Richards had painted quite a number of other classic sci-fi titles, including several by Ray Bradbury, and later on, two of Matheson's short story collections. I'll wrap up this post highlighting an interesting similarity between his 1955 cover to Bradbury's The Illustrated Man and Matheson's collection, The Shores of Space:
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