Bruce Pennington

Bruce Pennington (10 May 1944- ), born in Somerset, England, is a British painter and book cover art illustrator. Pennington attended the Ravensbourne School of Art in Bromley during the early 1960s. He began working as a freelance illustrator in 1967.

Since the late 1960s, he illustrated a number of science fiction and fantasy book covers, including the covers of novels by Isaac Asimov, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert A. Heinlein, and last but not least, several works by Frank Herbert. Particularly Herbert's original series of Dune novels (Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune) and the novels in his Destination: Void series (e.g. Whipping Star).

Trivia

 * Throughout the 1970s, the publisher Manor Books somewhat infamously reused parts of Pennington's front cover or back cover of Dune (1968 New English Library edition) as cover art for completely unrelated speculative fiction novels they had published (e.g. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick, Look Back to Earth by Don Pfeil, Sunwatch by Frank Dorn, or Alpha-II by Thomas Hubschman).
 * Pennington himself also illustrated the cover for National Lampoon's Doon, the famous early 1980s parody of the original Dune novel. The cover intentionally evoked and parodied the style of the book cover he designed for the 1968 edition of Dune published by New English Library.