Matti Louhi, book cover, 1972

Matti Louhi (b. 1936) is a prolific Finnish illustrator, who has designed and illustrated over 700 book covers in a career spanning more than 50 years. In the early 70s, he did the covers for a series of classics of erotic literature. It was a challenging assignment, to raise the subject matter to serious literature, and depict it without being sensationalistic, cheap, or crude. This is the cover for a 1972 edition of Teleny, a novel by an unknown author, but at the time often attributed to Oscar Wilde. It is noted for being an early piece of English fiction openly involving themes of homosexuality.