RARELY SEEN THESE DAYS, this large equestrian painting in acrylic, as well as gouache & ink, on board has a multitude of titles, including Ghost Rider. Click on it for enlargement.

Pennington produced it as a personal project in the early 1970s around the time he did the New English Library cover for The Green Brain (1973).

It was later reproduced as a greetings card (without message), as well as on the back of his own book Eschatus, both published by Dragon's World in 1977.

Approximately two metres in height, it forms the showpiece of the Deane Collection in Brisbane, Australia, one of the largest collections of Pennington's work outside Britain.

IN HIS CAREER AS a book cover artist Bruce Pennington produced at least two hundred for many of the most famous authors in the fields of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Below is a small selection, beginning with some of his covers for a series of Ray Bradbury books in the late 1960s.

Originally printed on a silver background, they 'reflected the obsession of the times with all things psychedelic and exotic'.

NEXT COMES A SELECTION of attractive young ladies from Pennington's past. None of these covers have previously appeared in collections of his work.The lower four historical titles demonstrate Pennington's ability to shift from one genre to another (depicting the past as well as the future with relative ease).

OF THE PICTURES BELOW Bruce Pennington says: 'Affectionately dubbed the "The Migraine Monochromes", these works are from a series of drawings I initially produced as post-Eschatus "therapy doodles", some of which developed into quite detailed dreamscapes with an almost etching-like quality to them.

'With my imagination fuelled by strong infusions of Tangerine Dream's music and other psychosonic influences, I did them quite often while recovering from bouts of migraine between 1976 & 78 when I was gradually pulling away from the gravitational "anxiety field" of Eschatus with all its schedules and commitments.

It was during this period that, strangely, my creativity seemed at its most feverish and potent.

Only the first of the drawings has ever been reproduced in print (in Ultraterranium).'

BELOW IS A GALLERY of various experimental paintings Pennington has produced over the years. Only the first has been published as a black and white print in Book of the Vampire.

IN HIS ROLE AS a predominantly book-cover artist, Pennington occasionally had the chance to portray some of the most notorious and controversial characters from the realms of the bizarre and supernatural. Here are three of them: Aleister Crowley, PT Barnum and Lobsang Rampa.