In my last year at BU's rigorously academic School of Fine Arts I showed a still life in oils to a teacher I deeply respected. It was a serious painting, I thought. He pondered it in dead silence, then finally announced, "You know, Howell, you should really go to work for Mad magazine." So eventually I showed a hilarious new portfolio to a Mad editor. Dead silence, then finally: "You have such a nice classic design sense—why not go into book design?" So I went across town to the US headquarters of Oxford University Press, whose restrained, elegant and authoritative typography was my ideal, but OUP had no use for hand-lettering and I wasn't equipped for the bizarre not-yet-digital technology they required. It seemed I'd never fit in anywhere. I faced a future of driving taxis, casting horoscopes, strangling ducks, organizing cults, tearing movie tickets, and such.
Finally, my old art school buddy Susie Schneider suggested I meet her old man to pick his brains. Bill Schneider, an advertising exec who'd presided over the Society of Illustrators for a term or two in the 1950s, noticed a couple of ink portraits in my portfolio and suggested I draw some more authors and then see about doing record covers for the Caedmon label. I took his advice. Caedmon wasn't interested, but I saw an ad in the help wanted classifieds for a place buying ink portraits of authors by the dozen...
...to be continued, or maybe not.
Finally, my old art school buddy Susie Schneider suggested I meet her old man to pick his brains. Bill Schneider, an advertising exec who'd presided over the Society of Illustrators for a term or two in the 1950s, noticed a couple of ink portraits in my portfolio and suggested I draw some more authors and then see about doing record covers for the Caedmon label. I took his advice. Caedmon wasn't interested, but I saw an ad in the help wanted classifieds for a place buying ink portraits of authors by the dozen...
...to be continued, or maybe not.
