This volume features Finlay's illustrations for the Astrology magazines. Quality reproduction on slick paper from the original artwork.

From the dustjacket:

Some ten years after his death, artist Virgil Finlay's expressed desire to see his astrological covers collected in book form has been accomplished. just one month before her death last October, Beverly Finlay completed arrangements with CBS Publications for rights to print a book containing her husband's drawings, originally published in Astrology Your Daily Horoscope and Everywoman's Daily Horoscope.

These drawings, done between the years of 1960 and 1970, are printed as Finlay did them - in black and white. When used on the magazines, color was added via overlays.

Finlay believed that these illustrations were among the finest of his thirty-five year career. Certainly, his pen and ink technique over that final 'decade was never better. He had attained a complete mastery of the use of the stipple - placing individual dots of ink on drawing board to create delicate shading.

Although he broke into the astrology field in 1956, he did only interior drawing until 1960. It was midway through that year that he drew his first cover, Cancer, the start of a series of so-called shield covers. They are distinguishable from his later covers in that he used a shield background with central figures depicting each month's sign of the zodiac.

Five previous volumes of Finlay's artwork featured drawings from science fiction and fantasy magazines and books, primarily from the 1935-1955 period. During the fourteen years he worked for the astrology magazines, he remained active in science fiction, working fairly regularly for publications like Amazing Stories, Fantastic, If, Galaxy, and Fantastic Universe, as well as doing considerable work for Doubleday. But the detailed stippling and cross-hatch styles for which he had become known gave way to a more simple line style of drawing. He saved his best techniques for the astrology covers, a higher paying market.

The last cover Finlay did was a 1970 Scorpio for Everywoman's Daily Horoscope. Illness had slowed his output in 1969 and 1970. He died of cancer on January 18, 1971 at the age of fifty-six.