Bouquets for Bama: As Good as Goldman

Part of a posthumous salute to artist James Bama.



Apparently, 1967’s The Harrad Experiment—about which I wrote the other day—was not James Bama’s first experiment with white-background paperback fronts. Southern California bookseller and books historian Lynn Munroe writes this about the 1965 edition of Willam Goldman’s Temple of Gold:

Before this book, any blank white space on a mass-market paperback cover was considered wasted space. Every inch of each cover had to be filled with color or text. Bantam [Books] started experimenting with white backgrounds, first with Mitchell Hooks, then James Bama.

The concept really took off with The Temple of Gold. It was stark and riveting, with one figure in hyper-realistic detail and nothing else except a blank white background. As Brian Kane noted in James Bama: American Realist, The Temple of Gold eventually sold millions of copies.

This wasn’t the only one of Goldman’s novels for which James Bama provided a cover illustration. You can also see his artistry on the 1968 Bantam edition of The Thing of It Is … and the 1965 Bantam paperback Your Turn to Curtsy, My Turn to Bow, both shown below.