Cover'd in Glory

Terry Gibbons has laboured long and hard to produce one of the most definitive sites in the genre - the subject in question being magazine cover art (from the early pulps to the modern favourites).

A Shropshire lad, Terry is here below to fill you in on his motivations for producing the site and where he aims to take it in the future ...

VISCO is the Visual Index of Science Fiction COver Art. I laboured long and hard over that acronym. You may or may not like it, but think of some of the alternatives – the Graphical Database of Fantasy Art, for example. It could have been a lot worse. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I came to register the domain name and found that it had already been grabbed by a company that makes viscous couplings, whatever they may be. That’s why you find Visco at www.sfcovers.net.

The original aims of Visco were a lot more modest than you might imagine - I just wanted a web site of my own, any web site. I'll come round to how it came to be about SF cover art and how the aims have evolved, but that's how simple it was in the first instance. It derives from my passion for the new information technology which, for me, represents the fulfillment of one of the great dreams of science fiction.

Most SF fans, I imagine, have been profoundly disappointed by the failure of space travel to fulfill its promise in our lifetimes, but information technology has changed the world beyond our wildest expectations. I still have to pinch myself when I sit at a computer screen and realise that I have, in principle, access to nearly the whole sum of human knowledge and the ability to reach people all over the world in a fraction of a second.

I first got involved with the Internet in the course of my job eight or nine years ago and was immediately riveted by its possibilities. When I bought my first home computer not long after, I could explore the world of cyberspace 24 hours a day, or to the limits of marital tolerance, at least. Many of my friends were setting up web sites, though in some cases just a few pictures of their family and the dog, and I wanted to have a go at one of my own in order to get to grips with this technology.

I did not have to look too far to find a subject. I first got hooked on science fiction when I was about eight years old and I had a substantial collection of SF magazines. Just at this time, I came across the eBay auction site and, out of curiosity, I looked to see if there were any magazines for sale. And there were thousands of them! With pictures!

This, I am afraid, woke a sleeping demon. My collection had lain dormant for a number of years and now I could feel the collector's itch again. I liken the passion for SF to malaria. It can stay quiet for years and you think you are cured, then something triggers another major attack and you realise you've got it for life. And the trouble with being a collector is that you have to have everything. I soon calculated that (a) there is a finite and, in principle, collectable number of SF magazines to be had; (b) the number, though finite, is large and I could not realistically hope to own them all; and (c) maybe it would be a lot cheaper to collect the pictures rather than the magazines themselves.

Then, (d), I realised that others might share this unhealthy obsession and that I had found the subject for my web site. I started work on it in about 1998 and I had a very early version of it working in about March 1999. Just then, however, my job became a lot more demanding and I had to put the site aside without quite getting it to a publishable state.

That is how it lay until the middle of 2001, when I found myself with more free time on my hands. I picked the project up again and started to collect and organise the images more systematically. Many were taken from eBay, some scanned from my own collection, some scanned for me by others, some borrowed from other sites. This has been very time consuming, as has cataloguing and annotating all of the images.

As I began to work on the site again, my concept of its scope and aims changed considerably. My first attempt was just a chatty little site with a few sample images from my own collection. I was now thinking of something that covered the whole field comprehensively, a serious reference resource as well as an enjoyable and informative site for the casual visitor.

That required a lot of background research and some careful thought about the design and navigation scheme, so it took quite a bit more work than I anticipated. The design of the web site and the underlying database has been a real challenge. I have had to learn a lot of new things to get to grips with that and it has a fascination all its own, quite apart from my interest in the subject material.

To bring the story up to date, the first version of Visco went on line in October 2002, I made some major design changes in 2003, then went off the air for several weeks when my hosting service went bust. I got it back on line with a new service provider, but did little with the site last summer and autumn because of various personal commitments. Now I am back in action again and, after the latest update, Visco has about 2300 images. Only 7,000 or so to go.

If people want to contribute, though, they don't need to worry about what goes on inside the black box. Since Visco went live, and for some while before that, I have had a dozen or more people helping me in one way or another. Mostly by contributing images they have scanned from their own collections but also by pointing me at useful sources, identifying artists, giving me background information on the magazines and the like.

This has been a huge encouragement. To make this easier, I now include a "Wants List" page that outlines gaps I need to fill in current titles and new titles forthcoming. There is full information on the site itself on how to submit images, what formats to use and so on. I also just value feedback from visitors on how they have found the site, whether they have enjoyed it or run into problems, as I am always striving to improve it.

So I end by offering thanks to all those who have helped me get the site off the ground and develop it to its present state – and not least to my late Uncle Albert, who had no idea what he was starting when he gave me my first SF magazine in 1956!

Terry Gibbons