Shabby Sunday is a meme created by Mischenko at ReadRantRock&Roll with the aim of sharing some vintage or older books in our collections. Please check out this wonderful blog when you have a chance!

I love vintage paperbacks, especially in science fiction and fantasy. It’s so fun to see what covers were used to sell books back in the day and how that reflected the times. So today I’m sharing three vintage paperbacks I have of some of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series. Sometimes when I’m browsing used books if I see an old cover that I think is interesting or different I’ll pick up a copy if it’s a series or book I’m a fan of.

Here we have vintage paperbacks of Dragonquest, Dragondrums, and Dragonsong. I am particularly fond of the Dragonsong cover, I really dig that style of artwork that was popular back in the day. I like the Dragonquest cover because of the bold covers, although the dragon looks so scary on the cover! All three covers feature fire lizards, which I love and would like to have as pets if only they were real. 🙂

Here we have some additional info about when and where these particular copies were published. They’re all 70’s and early 80’s editions. None of these are first editions, but it’s interesting to note that the 1977 printing of Dragonquest still has the same cover as the first edition which was originally published back in 1971. This is probably one of the last editions printed with this cover by Gino D’Achille before Michael Whelan’s cover came out in April of 1978. Both the covers for Dragondrums and Dragonsong were done by Elizabeth Malczynski.

Do any of you like collecting vintage paperbacks? What do you think of these older covers? Leave me a note in the comments, I’d love to hear from you!