The Dennis Wheatley 'Museum' - Dennis Wheatley’s Writing Technique

In the early days, DW drafted designs for the dust jackets,

DW's design for the jacket of 'The Devil Rides Out'

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Some of DW's designs for the jacket and an endpaper (?) of 'Black August'

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When DW became a successful author in the 1930s, he clearly had a vision not only of how the prose should emerge - after much polishing and after many iterations - but also for the look of the books.

DW either designed or got his family to help design the endpapers for his early books (and as his family was away, DW drew the endpapers for 'The Quest of Julian Day ', himself), and he also drew (or in the case of 'The Forbidden Territory', got his wife to draw) his own draft designs for his dustjackets. That the publishers did not use them (other than Joan's design for 'The Forbidden Territory', which they did use) is a pity, because they were at least as good as the ones the publishers used.

Later on, DW arranged for his favourite artist, Frank C Papé, to draw the jackets for some of his books with occult backgrounds.

DW's aspiration - at least in the early days - was thus to design the entire book, and even when he was a bestselling author and delegated this work, he always had an eye for a good dustjacket, whether it was on an English edition or on one of his foreign reprints.