Michael Heslop and The Dark is Rising Sequence

Nowadays Michael Heslop is a highly successful sports illustrator, specialising in golfing art. All jolly good, I'm sure! But he also produced my favourite and, in my opinion, easily the best covers for Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising Sequence.

The first book in the series, which was originally intended to be a standalone, was Over Sea, Under Stone.



The sequel, was The Dark is Rising.

 

Heslop only actually began doing covers for the series with the third book, Greenwitch, although he also went back and did covers for the paperback editions of the first two books as well.

 

Heslop's hardback covers of the last three books in the series are below.

 

Heslop was, I believe, somewhat unusual for a children's book illusrator, in that he ended up producing altogether new versions of all the books for their paperback editions in the 1980s. Here they are below.

He also produced a cover for the first edition of the one-volume version of the whole series. Below is the only properly "framed" copy of it I've been able to find of it on line. (There's another, slightly wonky one here.)