I’ve been on vacation since last Thursday, so I forgot to take screenshots of the glory until yesterday, but for nearly every day in the past week, Nextbook.org has been running stories garnished by illustrations I commissioned. Two are by artists you’ve seen here before—Samantha Hahn and Vanessa Davis—and two are by new! people!—Jonathon Rosen and Leela Corman.

You can see the pretty pictures at the following links (I’d do an image map on the banner above, but WordPress.com won’t let me):

• Samantha Hahn: The Rise and Fall—and Rise—of “Jewess” by Daniel Krieger
• Vanessa Davis: The Dangers of Salmonella by Danit Brown
• Jonathon Rosen: Inherit the Windbags by Peter Bebergal (home page screenshot)
• Leela Corman: The Half-Life by Rebecca Spence (home page screenshot)

Yay, illustrators!

Brainiac Josh Glenn takes issue with Steven Heller’s facile assertion that although “The human leg has evolved continually over many eons, adapting from an underwater propeller to its current form . . . on book covers and on film and theater posters, the leg has evolved very little.”

I hate to quibble with the master, since I’m a fan of Heller’s books. But this time he hasn’t put his best leg forward. Even a cursory glance at the leg-scenarios on display in Heller’s Print essay — and at Print Magazine’s A-Frame photoset at Flickr — indicate that the A-Frame is forever evolving.

The Flickr set is not entirely work-safe, but do check it out if nobody’s looking over your shoulder. Much excellence therein.

Now I just have to think of some excuse to put an A-frame illustration on the front of Nextbook.org . . .

Had you heard of fore-edge paintings? I hadn’t. From Karen at hangingtogether.org:

During Merrilee’s and my visit to the Boston Public Library last Friday, Tom Blake and Maura Marx introduced us to the results of the BPL’s digitization of its fore-edge books—books with paintings on their edges that can be viewed only by looking at the sides of the book. Some are “double fore-edge” books – one painting is visible when the leaves are fanned one way, and another painting appears when fanned another way.

The BPL has posted a CC-licensed Flickr set of fore-edge paintings with detailed captions. Love!

Thanks, Dylan!

Photo: [View of London Bridge.] posted by the Boston Public Library; some rights reserved.

I’m working on another Flickr set of public domain images—this time, ones from The Americana: A Universal Reference Library Comprising the Arts and Sciences, Literature, History, Biography, Geography, Commerce, etc., of the World, Vol. 21 (Triennial Act–Vivianite), edited by Frederick Converse Beach (New York: Scientific American Compiling Department, 1912).

Extracted, cleaned up (as best I could; most of them suffered from a particularly nasty pink-and-green moiré), captioned, and tagged for your pleasure. Go forth and repurpose them in peace.

I’ve downloaded a lot more old encyclopedias to cannibalize after this one. Idle time is the only constraint. Watch this space!

Other public domain Flickr sets:

• Illustrations from “The San Francisco Call”
• English Literature: An Illustrated Record

The lovely Vanessa Davis has drawn a three-page comic for Nextbook.org to celebrate Purim. You do not need to know much about Purim to know that this is awesome.

I’ve been working on cleaning up another set of public domain images and posting them to Flickr, and my plan was to unveil them all at once when I’d accumulated a nice, fat stack comparable to this earlier collection. I’m really, really busy this month, however, and I’m afraid I won’t get back to this project for a while, so here’s an aperitif, in the meantime: Selected illustrations—editorial and commercial—from the San Francisco Call, which was published from 1895 to 1913. The newspaper came to my attention via the famous Alberto Forero, who posted a great illustration of hands to his massive collection of Flickrized antiquities back in January. I asked where he’d found it, he sent me the link, and there went my next week and a half. Thanks a lot.

This newspaper—which I’d never even heard of—published so many fantastic illustrations during just the first month of 1900. Take this gorgeous full-page gangster by Methfessel, for example; or these dissolute gamesters by Cahill; or this fluid sketch; or the adorable torpedoes above. And don’t even get me started on the advertisements for quacky gadgets and rather dubious medicines.

I’m still adding captions, tags, and URLs, and eventually I’ll post more images to this set, but I wanted to at least begin to release these into the wild. If you like this kind of stuff, be sure to check out Alberto’s many awesome photo sets. Just don’t blame me if you lose a couple of days or weeks down in that rabbit hole—remember, it’s all Alberto’s fault.

I’ve been swooning over Matthew Woodson’s work at ghostco.org for months, so when a story landed on my desk that actually involved a ghost, I knew whom I wanted to ask to illustrate it.

I love the simultaneous attacking/comforting embrace of this ghost, as well as the little details like the texture of his hair and the pattern of the living boy’s sweater vest. In fact, I like it so much that I printed it out large and stuck it on the wall behind my desk. You can see an uncropped, larger version of the image on the story page: Brother’s Keeper (scroll to the bottom).

I’ve already asked Matthew to do another drawing for us, so watch this space . . .

My friend and fellow club member Eric Skillman, an associate art director at the Criterion Collection, has been interviewed over at WizardUniverse.com. They’re rather in need of a proofreader, but Eric’s intelligence and charm nevertheless come through.

For example I’m looking over the DVD’s on my desk —[Aikira Kurosawa’s] “Drunken Angel”, which is one we did with Jock (The Losers, Green Arrow: Year One, Faker). There’s a scene towards the end of the film where the characters are wresting around and the Matsunaga character knocks over into some cans of paint, and the paint spills in an artful kind of way and what was his black suit gets covered in white paint, so its a sort of a transformative moment where he’s rebelling against the Yakuza influence, which is represented by the snazzy black suit that he’s been wearing and he becomes purified in that scene. We took that and said that sort of scene and idea is what we want to riff off of. We took that to Jock, along with this idea that there’s this sump thing in the middle of the town that’s full of mud and its like this sucking hole that the center of town is being sucked down by the Yakuza influence, so we said maybe give us a backdrop of this muddy, crappy, sumpy grossness then a slosh of white paint with the character sort of crawling through it, and then he took that and abstracted it one step further and did his thing and then that became the cover.

Do freelance artists usually get notes like that?

Usually.

The Wizard Q&A: Eric Skillman, by David Paggi, posted 2/11/2008.

To see more of Eric’s work (other than at your local video store) and to read a lot more about his design process, see his fine, upstanding blog: Cozy Lummox.

I was looking for a particular image (which I did not find) on Google Books last week, and I stumbled across this fabulous tome: English Literature: An Illustrated Record in Four Volumes. Volume II: From the Age of Henry VIII to the Age of Milton. Part II, by Richard Garnett and Edmund Gosse (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905). It has illustrations on nearly every page, most of which are title pages from the books under discussion. Some are gorgeous, some are appalling, nearly all are interesting. And they’re all well within the public domain.
Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday’s story by Jessica Apple about her wacky-wonderful grandma required a wacky-wonderful illustration. And who better to do that, I thought, than Martha Rich, whose daily paintings at Freedom Wig are so . . . well . . . you just have to go look at them. I’d been wanting to hire Martha for months, but this was the first story to come up that I thought really needed her.

See the whole painting and read the story on the site: Repeating History.

I confess that I Botoxed the wrinkles on the woman’s face a bit—we received word that Bashy, the subject of the story, was in very poor health, so I thought a more tender representation was in order (though I’m sure this looks nothing like her, anyway—I didn’t ask for any reference photos).

If you’re in L.A., go see Martha’s show at La Luz de Jesus gallery. It’s up until January 27. And if anybody wants to buy me Good Girl Pie, I’d appreciate it.