Greg Irons D&D coloring album cover sells for $57,500 at auction

A piece of Dungeons & Dragons ephemera that most players would have shrugged at in the 1980s just sold for real money: Greg Irons’ wraparound cover painting for The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album brought $57,500 at Heritage Auctions, buyer’s premium included.

Heritage identified the work as original art for TSR Hobbies and Troubador Press’s 1979 coloring album and treated it as an especially rare survivor from the early AD&D era. The lot led the sale, and bidding had already reached $3,300 before the auction closed, a useful reminder that niche hobby originals can climb fast once the right collectors show up.

The appeal goes well beyond tabletop nostalgia. Irons, born Sept. 29, 1947, in Philadelphia and later based in San Francisco, moved through several corners of alternative art culture: poster artist, underground cartoonist, animator, and tattoo artist. Biographical sources tie him to Yellow Submarine, Bill Graham posters, and comics work for Print Mint and Last Gasp. He died on Nov. 14, 1984, in Bangkok, Thailand, which gives the sale a strong posthumous-collector edge. This is not just D&D art; it is a slice of underground illustration history that happens to wear a beholder and a Tiamat on its face.

That matters because the album itself is a strange and genuinely important TSR artifact. The 32-page book was written by Gary Gygax and was not a simple coloring book at all. Archive copies show it contains rules spread through the pages, casts Gygax as the dungeon master, and uses two six-sided dice for a solo dungeon-crawl in which the player hunts a talisman through a dangerous dungeon. Along the way, it throws classic monsters at the reader, including a lich, beholder, bulette, and Tiamat. For anyone tracking the earliest shape of D&D, that makes the cover a piece of game history, not just shelf candy.

The sale also fits the bigger TSR-era market story. The late 1970s were the years when AD&D’s first hardcovers were landing and tournament play was getting formalized in products like C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, used at Origins ’79. At the same time, the coloring album still exists today in PDF and print-on-demand form, which makes the original Irons painting feel even more singular: the cheap reprint is easy to get, but the real artifact from TSR’s formative years is now the thing collectors are paying five figures to own.