Mahlon Blaine (1894-1969)

This book jacket biography is not of the author of the book shown above but of its illustrator. The book is Black Majesty: The Life of Christophe, King of Haiti by John W. Vandercook (1902-1963), published in 1928 by Harper & Brothers. I have the fourteenth edition, this particular book having come from the collection of Margaret B. Nicholas of Bartlett and Marietta, Ohio.

The illustrator of Black Majesty was the enigmatic Mahlon Blaine. Born Mahlon Blain on June 16, 1894, in Albany, Oregon, Blaine was a commercial artist, costume designer, muralist, illustrator, and fine artist, possibly also a stage actor. He worked in Albany and Portland, Oregon, and in San Francisco and Los Angeles. He began his career as an illustrator in the 1920s. In the early 1960s, he illustrated a number of reprints of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950). On August 18, 1932, Blaine married Fern Bowman (dates unknown) in Los Angeles city or county, California, a fact missing from many biographical sketches of him. By 1942, when he filled out his World War II draft card, he did not list her as next of kin. I guess we can assume that their marriage had ended by then. Blaine is known to have exaggerated, if not to have fabricated the facts of his life. I'm not sure how much stock I would put in the book jacket bio shown here.

Like many artists, Mahlon Blaine struggled to pay the bills. He is supposed to have been impoverished late in life and to have died in obscurity. The end came in January 1969 in Los Angeles city or county.

There is an entry for Mahlon Blaine in the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, here. You can also read about him on the website Bill & Sue-On Hillman's ERBzine, here. Fortunately for fans of his work and for the art of fantasy in general, there are several recent books showing Blaine's artwork.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Ernest Kurt Barth (1929-2001)

Last time I wrote about Lou and Zena Shumsky, authors of the young person's novel First Flight (1962). (She was really the author. Her husband was more of a technical advisor.) This time I would like to write about the illustrator of their book, Ernest Kurt Barth.

Ernest Kurt "Ernie" Barth was born on March 23, 1929, in Rockville Centre, New York, to Ernest and Paula K. (Meeh) Barth. His parents were born in Germany and arrived in America only shortly before his birth. The elder Ernest Barth was a painting contractor but also, as his son remembered, a hobbyist. Ernie Barth was thus well prepared for illustrating a book about boys who build and fly model airplanes.

Ernest K. Barth graduated from Memorial High School in West New York, New Jersey, and served for two years in the U.S. Marine Corps. He applied his G.I. Bill benefits to his education in art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in fine arts in 1952. I suspect that he also met his future wife at Pratt.

Ernest Barth had a varied career in art. He worked for a firm called Cellomatic in the early days of television animation. In 1954, he served as an assistant to Al Capp (1909-1979) on the syndicated comic strip Li'l Abner. (Frank Frazetta [1928-2010] was another of Capp's assistants at the time.) From 1953 to 1957, Barth created cover art and interior illustrations for science fiction magazines. Afterwards, he expanded into illustrating books for Dell, Harper & Row, and Random House. Later in life, while living and working in Tuxedo Park, New York, he worked as a graphic artist and commercial artist.

Barth's first wife, Eileen Ann Furlong Barth (1931-1986), was also an artist and a teacher of art at Monroe-Woodbury High School in Woodbury, New York. She was the daughter of Raymond H. Furlong, a printer for the New York Times, and Anna (Ungerer) Furlong, a bank clerk. The Barths and their two daughters lived in San Miguel De Allende, Mexico, for a year in 1973-1974, where Eileen Barth received her master's degree in fine arts. Eileen Ann Furlong Barth died tragically young of cancer. Her husband remarried. He died on March 28, 2001, in Tuxedo Park. His remains were cremated and the ashes scattered, fittingly, by airplane over Orange County, New York.

One of the reasons that I have wanted to write about Ernest Kurt Barth is to show his artwork in the fields of science fiction and fantasy. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) has a list--actually two lists--of his credits in those fields. I would like to acknowledge that website and to expand on the available biographical information on him. (Find A Grave has a fuller biography than what I have written here, and so I would also like to acknowledge Von Rothenberger, who posted it, along with a photo of Barth, to that site.) There are two entries on the ISFDb on Barth, one for Ernie Barth, the other for Ernest K. Barth. My hope is that those two entries will be combined and that Barth will receive his full due as an artist.

Ernie Barth's cover for Fantastic, October 1954. He was twenty-five when this picture was published. The cover story was "The Yellow Needle" by Gerald Vance.

If you pull back the curtain and show how artwork is really made, submitted, and used in publication, you will see images like this one, Barth's illustrations for Russ Winterbotham's short story "Loralei of Chaos," from Amazing Stories, November 1954. Note the editor's or engraver's marks in blue pencil. Note also the name "H. Rogoff." That was Herb Rogoff (1927-2018), art editor of Ziff-Davis Fiction Group and himself an artist.

Finally, Barth's illustration for "Forced Move," a short story by Henry Lee, published in Worlds of If, June 1955.

Text copyright 2021 Terence E. Hanley

Jane Werner (1915-2004) & Eloise Wilkin (1904-1987)

 

Nearly every American child from the 1940s to today knows and remembers Little Golden Books, a series that began as a joint venture between Simon and Schuster and Western Printing and Lithographing Company. The books in this series are and were loved and treasured, and they have sold millions of copies since their beginning in 1942.

Ten years later, Simon and Schuster published The Christmas Story, written by Jane Werner and illustrated by Eloise Wilkin. Jane Werner's prose and Eloise Wilkin's pictures are tender and sensitive and well suited to children. An example appears on the first page of The Christmas Story:

This is Mary, a girl of Galilee.

     She lived long years ago, but such a wonderful thing happened to her that we remember and love her still.

". . .we remember and love her still." The book and the story behind it are stories of love, joy, and devotion. The Christmas story, one of love, is also one that will never end.

Elsa Jane Werner was born on July 11, 1915, in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin High School as salutatorian in 1931 and the University of Wisconsin in 1936. (One of her classmates was writer and biographer Maurice Zolotow.) Elsa Jane Werner taught English and social science in Sheboygan for a year. By 1939, she was working for Western Printing in Racine, Wisconsin, where she would go on to write scores of Little Golden Books, beginning with Noah's Ark in 1943. She was also an editor, and as her brief biography in The Christmas Story reads, she supervised the line of Golden Books from the Walt Disney Studio. In 1954, she married Earnest C. Watson (1892-1970), a very prominent physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The couple lived in Santa Barbara and in India. Jane Werner Watson survived her husband by more than a quarter of a century. She died on April 9, 2004, in Santa Barbara.

Eloise Wilkin was born Eloise Margaret Burns on March 30, 1904, in Rochester, New York. When she was toddler, her family moved to New York City. They moved back to Rochester when she was fifteen, and she graduated from Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute in 1923. She supported herself as a freelance artist in New York City for four years before marrying Sidney J. Wilkin (1899-1964) in 1930. "I was never driven to have a career," she said. "Family life was always my first interest," and so she stopped working full time as an artist in order to raise a family, which would eventually number four children and many grandchildren. (1)

In 1938, Eloise Wilkin's sister, Esther (sometimes spelled Ester) asked her to draw the pictures for a book she had written called Mrs. Peregrine and the Yak. It was Eloise's first children's book and the start of a new career that would carry her through to the end of her life. In 1944, she began illustrating books for Western Printing and had forty-seven titles in all for the company. Jane Werner Watson called her "the soul of Little Golden Books." (2) Eloise also designed dolls and counted Nikita Khrushchev among her fans. 

Eloise M. Burns Wilkin, a devout Christian, died on October 4, 1987, in Brighton, New York. Incidentally, her sister, author Esther M. Burns (1902-1985), married the brother of Sidney Wilkin, George A. Wilkin (1901-1987).

Notes

(1) Quoted in "Eloise Wilkin: A Portrait" in the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette (Lancaster, Ohio), December 15, 1979, page 9.

(2) Quoted by Eloise Wilkin's daughter, Deborah Wilkin Springett, in her introduction for Eloise Wilkin Stories (2005).

The fourth and fifth images shown above include depictions of Joseph, the patron saint of fathers. I show it here in the year that my own father has died. This will be our first Christmas without him. St. Joseph is also the patron of happy deaths. I can't say that my father's death was happy, but he died in his sleep, apparently at peace and without pain, and to join my mother, his wife, who went before him and perhaps prepared his way.

Merry Christmas

&

Happy New Year to All!

Copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Al Price (1924-1994)

Alvin Mefford Price was born on July 19, 1924, near Georgetown, Kentucky. His parents were Emerson Mefford (1882-1929), a sharecropping farmer, and Nellie B. (Johnson) Mefford (dates unknown). Alvin was the third of their seven children.

Alvin's father died when he was four years old. His mother tried to keep the family together, "[b]ut it was more than she could do," Alvin remembered. "My oldest brother was big enough to work on the land, so she kept him. Four of us were sent to the orphanage in Louisville. My name was Alvin Mefford when I went to the orphanage."

When he was in the fourth grade, Alvin was adopted by Mrs. Carrie Price, a school dietician, and her husband, a hotel janitor. He took their surname and became Alvin Mefford Price. He later shortened it to just Al Price.

Price first went to Louisville Central High School, then, when his family moved, to Northwestern High School in Detroit. He played tennis and basketball and served on the student council. He also won a National Scholastic award for a picture he had painted in his junior year. Price attended summer school every summer and graduated from high school in just three years.

World war came and in September 1943 Price enlisted in the U.S. Army. Recognizing his artistic talent, the army sent him to art school at McDill Field in Florida, then to Greenville Army Air Field in Greenville, Mississippi, where he and two other artists designed posters. Price was transferred to Hawaii, then to Guam, where he spent thirteen months before returning home to be separated in 1946. Price served another year in the army from July 1952 to July 1953.

As his biography in Haunted by a Paintbrush (above) says, Al Price studied at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) in Detroit, also at several art schools. He was an illustrator, painter, and muralist. In addition to appearing in many magazines, his paintings and drawings were and are in Illinois Negro History Makers (1969), at the Coleman Branch of the Chicago Public Library, and possibly also in the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, co-founded by his friend and associate Margaret Burroughs (1915-2010).

Price lived in Chicago for many years. In addition to his work as a commercial artist and fine artist, he was also a teacher, and he was deeply involved in the art scene in his adopted hometown, more specifically the art scene that included black artists Bernard Goss (1913-1966), Anna McCullough Tyler (1930-2009), Alfred J. "Al" Tyler (1933-2011), Vincent Saunders, Jr. (1916-2005), Benny Horton (dates unknown), and Sylvester Britton (1926-2009).

Al Price died on January 15, 1994, probably in Chicago. He was sixty-nine years old.

I found Al Price's autobiography Haunted by a Paintbrush: A True Story (1968) at a local secondhand store yesterday, and what a treasure it is--a treasure not only because of its smallness and its several pen-and-ink illustrations but also because it is a story for children about overcoming adversity and persevering in pursuit of one's dreams.

The images above are from that book. From top to bottom they are:

1. The front cover, which shows the artist in a double self-portrait, as an adult and as a child, with themes and motifs that reappear in the interior, the handmade hobby horse and the artist's easel.

2. An illustration showing Al Price in childhood with one of his sisters, possibly his older sister Sallie. The names on the wall are of his other siblings, Ella and Billy. Note the hobby horse and other homemade toys.

3. A biography of Al Price, prepared, I presume, by Margaret Friskey (1901-1995), editor of Childrens Press of Chicago and the person responsible for the publication of Haunted by a Paintbrush.

4. A photograph by Robert Vandiver of Al Price in his studio with one of his paintings. The painting is unidentified, but it has an obvious heroic quality. The man's slight dress, the manacle on his left wrist, and the shackle on his left ankle suggest that he is a slave now freed. It looks like he is casting down a round object, but what is it?

The self-portrait on the cover and the photograph both show Price with brushes in his right hand, but after badly injuring that hand in a fall from a scaffold, he had to learn to paint with his left hand, and that's what he did for more than half of his life.

I'm afraid I couldn't find any images of Al Price's paintings or murals on the Internet, and that's a shame. We shouldn't forget artists and their works. I'm happy to have this chance to remember Al Price and to show once again a little of his very fine artwork.

Original text copyright 2020 Terence E. Hanley

Steele Savage (1898-1970)

Harry Steele Savage was born on December 21, 1898, in Central Lake, Michigan. According to his biography in The Rainbow Book of Bible Stories (The World Publishing Company, 1956, shown above), he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Slade School in London, and in Vienna and Paris. He designed the sets and costumes for Caviar, a musical comedy than ran for twenty performances at the Forrest Theatre in New York in 1934. Savage was also a designer of furniture, and he created at least one poster design during World War II.

Steele Savage is most well known as an illustrator of books, especially on mythology, history, and the Bible. He also created the covers for many science fiction novels of the 1960s and '70s. The illustrations above, from The Rainbow Book of Bible Stories by J. Harold Gwynne (1956), show Savage's style, which can be described as a kind of magical realism. Savage's other credits include:

• The Decameron of Boccaccio (Blue Ribbon Books, 1931)
• The Arabian Nights edited by Bennett Cerf (Triangle Books, 1932)
• The Droll Stories of Honoré de Balzac (1932)
• No Other Man by Alfred Noyes (1940)
• Stories of the Gods and Heroes by Sally Benson (1940)
• Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton (1942)
• Throne of the World by Louis de Wohl (1949)
• The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March (1949)
• Adventures with the Giants by Catherine F. Sellew (1950)
• Adventures with the Heroes by Catherine F. Sellew (1954)
• The Life of Christ by the Abbé Constant Fouard (1954)
• The Token by Samuel Shellabarger (1955)
• The Golden Library Book of Bible Stories by Jonathan Braddock (1956)
• Martin Luther by Henry Emerson Fosdick (1956)
• The Adventures of Ulysses by Gerald Gottlieb (1959)
• Little Golden Book of Airplanes by Ruth Mabee Lachman (1959) 
• Life in the Ancient World by Bart Winer (1961)
• The Virginian by Owen Wister (Scholastic, 1964)
• Golden Blood by Jack Williamson (1967)
• The Well of the Unicorn by Fletcher Pratt (1967)
• Breakthrough by Richard Cowper (1969)
• Between Planets by Robert A. Heinlein (1970)
• Have Spacesuit, Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein (1970)
• Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert A. Heinlein (1970)
• The Long Result by John Brunner (1970)
• The Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein  (1970)
• The Sorcerer's Skull by David Mason (1970)
• The Squares of the City by John Brunner (1970)
• The Star Beast by Robert A. Heinlein (1970)
• Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein (1970)
• Starbreed by Martha deMey Clow (1970)
• The Whole Man by John Brunner (1970)
• Anti-Man by Dean R. Koontz (1970)
• The Citadel of Fear by Francis Stevens (1970)
• Black in Time by John Jakes (1970)
• Report on Probability A by Brian W. Aldiss (1970)
• Tunnel in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein (1970)
• Barrier World by Louis Charbonneau (1970)
• World's Bible Story Library by J. Harold Gwynne (a multi-volume reissue of The Rainbow Book of Bible Stories, 1970)
• Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein (1971)
• Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner (1972)
• Hurlbut's Story of the Bible (revised edition) by Jesse Lyman Hurlburt (1974)

This list is not necessarily complete.

Steele Savage lived in New York for much of his career. He died on December 5, 1970, at age seventy-one. You can read a little more about him on my blog, Tellers of Weird Tales, here. Part of the book list above is from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

Original text copyright 2015 Terence E. Hanley

Anne Marie Jauss (1902-1991)

Anne Marie Jauss, daughter of two painters, Georg Jauss and Caroline Jauss, was born in Munich on February 3, 1902. She studied in Munich, Merano, and Stuttgart, then at the State School of Applied Arts in Munich. Anne Marie became a painter and was noticed in her home city and in Berlin, but in 1932, fearing the coming Nazi regime, she emigrated to Portugal, where she remained for fourteen years. Living in and around Lisbon, she made her living as a painter, illustrator, interior architect, designer, and ceramic artist. In 1946, she removed to New York, afterwards to New Jersey, where she built a house in 1962 and where she lived out the rest of her days. Anne Marie illustrated more than seventy books, mostly children's books. One, The Pasture, was her own, and she won a prize for it. Anne Marie Jauss died on September 13, 1991, in Milford, New Jersey, at age eighty-nine.

Original text copyright 2014 Terence E. Hanley

Simon Greco (1917-2005)

Simon Greco was born on April 9, 1917, in Italy to an Italian-American father and an Italian mother. Greco arrived in the United States near the end of 1921. The passenger manifest for his ship (propitiously named S.S. Providence) gave his birthplace as "Spesano." I suspect that he came from Spezzano, located in the southern part of the country. The Greco family settled in St. Louis where his father, Giuseppe Greco, worked for a gas company. Greco's mother was named Maria. By the 1940s, Simon Greco had relocated to New York and Connecticut, haven for artists. He was married to Eleen Williams (1920-2008).

You can read the high points of Simon Greco's life in the book jacket biography I have posted here. It's from a  large paperbound book called The Art of Perspective Drawing, published by M. Grumbacher, Inc., in 1968. Grumbacher put out a lot of really fine instruction books in art, but this one is especially good. The highlights of course are Mr. Greco's illustrations. He was an artist hard to categorize, but that makes him that much more interesting. His work is partly realistic, almost in a photographic way. (He painted a number of trompe l'oeil pictures.) He can also be considered a surrealist and a magical realist in a style that was very common at mid-century, especially in advertising and other commercial art. Simon Greco also painted covers for magazines, including men's magazines of the 1950s and '60s.

Simon Greco was an extraordinary artist. His work is mesmerizing. Fortunately for us, he lived a long life. He died on January 20, 2005, in Westborough, Massachusetts, at age eighty-seven.

Text copyright 2013 Terence E. Hanley

Terence Barrow & Ray Lanterman

Terence Barrow (ca. 1932-2001) and Ray Lanterman (1916-1994) co-authored two books, Incredible Hawaii (1974) and More Incredible Hawaii (1986). Both men were residents of Hawaii. The Hoosier Lanterman had been present at the attack on Pearl Harbor and lived in Hawaii from the 1940s onward. Barrow, a native New Zealander, came to Hawaii in 1964 and worked there as a museum curator, author, and representative for Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Company. Their books are compilations of Hawaiian folklore and history. Lanterman's illustrations are reminiscent of those in the newspaper comic feature Ripley's Believe It or Not!

Terence Barrow died on August 31, 2010, at age seventy-eight. His obituary appeared in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on September 10, 2001, the day before disaster struck. You can read more about Ray Lanterman on my blog, Indiana Illustrators.

Text copyright 2013 Terence E. Hanley

Miriam Gilbert & Sidnee Neale

Glory Be! The Career of a Young Hair Stylist (New York: Hastings House, Publishers, 1967) is a novel for young people written by Miriam Gilbert, aka Mrs. Abe Presburg. The book jacket bio here is the sum total of what I know about her. The illustrator, Sidnee Neale, was born on May 16, 1904, in Baltimore, Maryland. She was a muralist and an illustrator, and she worked in collage and mixed media. Sidnee died in California in October 1977.

Text copyright 2013 Terence E. Hanley

E. Harper Johnson & Burl Ives

Today I found a worn and moldy copy of Albad the Oaf, a children's book by Burl Ives, published in 1965. I have always thought that Burl Ives is a little bit creepy, but I'm not writing today to show his book-jacket biography. Instead, I would like to talk about the illustrator, E. Harper Johnson. Unfortunately, I know very little about him, not even a date or place of birth. All I know is that he was an illustrator, comic book artist, violinist, and opera singer. He may also have been an archaeologist. Johnson illustrated many books in the 1950s and '60s, especially biographies and historical books for children. At least two of those books were by the poet Arna Bontemps. Johnson's illustrations for Ageless Africa: A Pictorial History of the Golden Past by William Leo Hansberry appeared in Ebony magazine in 1965. I'm not sure that the book was ever published, as Hansberry died in November of that year. In any case, the artist Johnson lived on Long Island in 1965. He later married Salma Tahira Malik (Aug. 8, 1928-Oct. 10, 1979, Beverly Hills, California).

Text copyright 2012 Terence E. Hanley

Gino D'Achille & Betty Millsaps Jones

Hello and welcome to Book Jacket Bios. Every now and then I will post biographies, images, and other information taken directly from books on the shelf. As always, this blog is for informational and educational purposes only. Copyrights remain with their respective holders.

I'll start with book jacket biographies of Betty Millsaps Jones and Gino D'Achille. They come from Ms. Jones' adaptation of King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard, published by Random House and its Step-Up Adventures line in 1982. Readers of fantasy will recognize the work of Gino D'Achille. Born in 1935, Mr. D'Achille has been working as a professional illustrator and fine artist for decades. In the 1970s he created the covers for the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, issued by Ballantine Books. His eleven wraparound covers for the series are striking, evocative, and dream-like. Some are quite eerie, even frightening, perhaps none more so than the cover of The Chessmen of Mars.

Mr. D'Achille is still living and has a website of his own, the self-titled Gino D'Achille. You can see images of his original paintings there. You can see the book covers themselves on any number of websites, including that of Scott Dutton, here.

Gino D'Achille is a world treasure. I wish him continued health, happiness, and success.

Text copyright 2012 Terence E. Hanley