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Cover art © 1980 by Gerry Daly

This is the July 1981 Timescape / Pocket Books edition of The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The art is by Gerry Daly, who did such magnificent work for The House That Stood Still, Mission to the Stars, and The Weapon Shops of Isher — and an interview with him can be read here. My copy is a tad crinkled but the emphasis is on the lower half of the cover, which has remained in relatively good condition.
This is probably the best depiction of Coeurl I've yet seen. Coeurl is the cat-like creature discovered in the first part of the book, living in the ruins of a dead planet.
So loyal is Daly's illustration that it's possible to pinpoint the sentence in the book that is shown on the cover — "He [Coeurl] looked up with a start, and saw that a small ship was approaching from the direction of the lowering sun." It is unusual for a single sentence to be used like this, and especially with such a good end result that communicates the mood of the entire book. All the essential elements are here — the ruined planet, the alien, the spaceship of explorers, and the imminent encounter. This is the atmosphere of the book in a nutshell, the sense of wonder that is so commonly associated with Van's work.
Coeurl is a "monster" in the traditional sense of the word, and yet in the novel he is not treated unsympathetically. He is a creature from a destroyed civilization trying to survive, and the humans come along right at the point where it is about to die of starvation. What else would the result be? Daly's portrayal of Coeurl is reminiscent of a lion, which fits in with the book's description. Also like a lion, it's a mighty creature that is neither good nor evil, and must eat, and is not a force to be trifled with. The difference is that Coeurl is an intelligent being, and this gives him an edge — since he is weak, he must use his intelligence to better capture his unsuspecting prey, a situation that would not arise with a lion who would forgo caution and simply follow the demands of its hunger. This makes Coeurl both a sympathetic yet particularly menacing adversary for the crew.

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