© Lee Moyer 1997, used with permission

Lee Moyer says: "I sketched the cover in my sketchbook in a few minutes, and then spent many hours working on the cover image/s in Adobe Photoshop on an old Macintosh 7500. The image was far too large to be worked on as a single piece, so I split it into four quadrants, each illustrating a different short story. Clockwise from upper left they are: «The Edge of the World», «The Wireless Folly», «North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy», and «The Changeling's Tale». When I had finished all the individual sections, I put them together around the a central circle. When that was complete I filled the center with a view of «Mother Grasshopper».

The compass rose is intended as a play on the title, showing simple directions marked in a Qabalistic cypher. From a design standpoint, it provides the fig leaf which masks incongruities, allowing the outer edges to blend seamlessly. I greatly enjoyed building the compass from negative sections of the pictures, it seemed in keeping with the darkly reflective visions within. The stories are magnificent in their oblique variety, and I hoped to convey some of that with the cover. I also wanted to show the stories from a slightly different perspective than I used for the grayscale engravings inside the book. For example, «The Edge of the World» is seen from below here, but is viewed in a top-down cartographic style inside."

More about Lee Moyer and his work at http://www.leemoyer.com/