If you, like me, have a permanent Amazon search for “Smart Pop” as one of your browser bookmarks, you might have noticed a new book that popped up a few months back, to be published in late June 2012: Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, a collection of essays on the books. You might have also noticed that this page has remained stubbornly absent of cover image.

Today, I’m very pleased to share Beyond the Wall‘s front cover, which you’ll see over there to the right of this paragraph. The design is the always-excellent work of Charles Brock over at Faceout Studio, who not only put together a whole set of fantastic comps for us, but also patiently weathered (and, okay, largely performed) our extensive search for just the right (dire)wolf—because properly representing the Starks is a pretty tall order.

(Also, there is not exactly a wealth of great threatening wolf shots available for use out there. Shocking, I know. Who wouldn’t want to get in an angry wolf’s face, holding a camera?)

We’ll announce the full line-up as soon as it solidifies, but I can say I’m really excited about the list of people editor Jim Lowder has pulled together here—including Elio and Linda from the fantastic Westeros.org, Adam Whitehead over at The Wertzone, SFF scholars, writers, and more.

Though we love the HBO television series (and there might be a stray television reference here or there), we’re really focusing here on Martin’s novels, from A Game of Thrones all the way through A Dance with Dragons. We wanted to give you advance warning in case you hadn’t finished reading yet. :)

If you want to make sure you’re kept up to date on the book’s progress, you can, of course, sign up for our update list below. We’ll let you know when the contributor list is up, and send you a special early excerpt as soon as it’s available, as well as reminding you when the pub date comes and alerting you to any giveaways we do.

Hope you love the cover as much as we do!

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