Who illustrated the Arslan novels?

Yoshiki Tanaka's The Heroic Legend of Arslan began in August 1986 and ran for sixteen novels, closing only in December 2017. The first edition, published by Kadokawa Shoten, carried illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano across its ten volumes, and it is those painted covers, all turbans, blades and desert light, that defined Prince Arslan's Pars for its first readers.

When the series moved to Kobunsha in 2005, the art changed hands to Shinobu Tanno, who illustrated the current edition through to the final volume. So an Arslan shelf holds two different objects wearing one title: the Amano Kadokawa paperbacks of the 1980s and 1990s, and the Tanno Kobunsha editions that finished the story three decades after it began.

Two traps wait for collectors in this. Hiromu Arakawa's celebrated manga adaptation, begun in 2013, is a third artist entirely, not a reprint of the novel art. And the novels themselves have never had an official English edition, so Amano's Arslan exists, like his Guin Saga, only in Japanese printings. The Library's Arslan shelf keeps the series history, its anime versions and a gallery of the novel editions together.