They Also Served: Bayre Phillips

Illustrator
(1924–69)

One of the 20th century’s most prolific book cover illustrators from the forties through to the sixties, BARYE WINCHELL PHILLIPS was born in September 1905 in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and attended the National Academy of Design and The Art Students League of New York.

Not even twenty, he began working as a bullpen artist for Columbia Pictures’ advertising department, where he was “discovered” by Pocket Books’ art editor and cover design illustrator Sol Immerman. Immerman was looking for someone who could do “beautiful women with low necklines” for the covers of some historical novels (something Sol couldn’t do), and so Phillips began doing covers for Pocket. But his new gig was cut short when he was drafted in 1943, and he ended up illustrating training manuals and propaganda posters and leaflets for the US Army in Fort Belvois, Virginia where, presumably, necklines weren’t an issue.

After the war, Phillips struck out on his own to pursue a career as a freelance illustrator. Among his first clients was Al Allard, art director at Fawcett, who gave him many assignments for Gold Medal Books.

The word soon spread, and the contracts came pouring in. He served as the illustrator of several comic strip adaptations of literary classics for the Bell Syndicate’s Famous Fiction’ newspaper feature and did covers for pulp magazines such as Master Detective, Amazing Stories and Fantastic, but his forté was paperbacks. His signature “Baryé” can be found on countless releases from Avon, Bantam, Crest, Dell, Pocket Books, Signet, Berkely-Medallion, Popular Library, Cardinal, Dell, Royal and Pocket, among others, but he’s probably most remembered for his Fawcett Gold Medal work (including some of the early Shell Scott books by Richard S. Prather, and covers of the original James Bond paperbacks by Signet. He worked in all the genres, from humor and romance to science fiction and westerns, but he really found a home doing covers for mystery and crime authors like Mickey Spillane, Day Keene, Henry Kane, James M. Cain, Carter Brown, Charles Williams, Stephen Marlowe, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ian Fleming, Fredric Brown, Lionel White, Earl Norman, John D. MacDonald, and Gil Brewer.

Phillips was so prolific and so fast (regularly turning out three or four finished paintings a week), always meeting deadlines and able to work in so many various styles, that he soon became publishers’ go-to guy, and earned him the nickname “The King of the Paperbacks.”

WORKS INCLUDE:

Case of the Vanishing Beauty by Richard Prather (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1950)
Typical, even generic shot of a woman in distress, but very effective use of fog. Eerie. Later both the covers and the books got much sillier…
On the Road by Jack Kerouac (Signet, 1958)
Double Trouble by Richard S. Prather and Stephen Marlowe (Fawcett Gold Medal)
Phillips was the obvious choice—he’d already done covers for both writers.
The Morocco Jones books by Jack Baynes (Crest, 1957-59)
The Mike Hammer books by Mickey Spillane (Signet)
The Big Caper by Lionel White (Frederick Muller Gold Award, 1961)
Spring Fire by Vin Packer (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1952)