Armstrong Sperry (1897-1976)

Armstrong Wells Sperry was born on November 7, 1897, in New Haven, Connecticut, and attended the Yale School of Art and the Art Students League. During World War I he served in the U.S. Navy, and in the 1920s he traveled in the South Seas. Returning to New York City, Sperry found work as a commercial artist and illustrator. His first book for children was published in 1933. Call It Courage was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1941.

The book shown here, The Amazon: River Sea of Brazil, is from 1961 and a series called "Rivers of the World Books." It is illustrated with photographs and with maps by Sam Galy. The jacket design is by Ernest Kurt Barth.

Armstrong Sperry died on April 26, 1976, at age seventy-eight.

Original text copyright 2014 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

Jack Matthews (1925-2013)

I learned yesterday that Jack Matthews died last year. I regret that I didn't know about his death until yesterday. I regret more that I never knew him, although I saw him often for several years. John Harold Matthews was born on July 22, 1925, in Columbus, Ohio. His résumé‎ alone makes interesting reading, but you can find that on your own. Mr. Matthews was a novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, essayist, professor of English, and book collector. He was a regular at the local library book sale. Always in good humor, he spoke to everyone he knew and some he didn't. Invariably he wore a sport coat and a bolo tie. Jack Matthews died on Thanksgiving morning, November 28, 2013. I was away and didn't learn of his passing until yesterday when I picked up one of his books at the library. It is called Hanger Stout, Awake!, and it was Jack Matthews' first novel, published in 1967. I have read the first chapter and I am hooked--or maybe I should say I'm hanging on each word.

Jacket design by Robin Sherwood

Original text copyright 2014 Terence E. Hanley

Carl Fallberg (1915-1996)

Cartoonist, writer, and railroad enthusiast Carl Fallberg (1915-1996) and his book Fiddletown & Copperopolis (River Forest, IL: Heimburger House Publishing Co., 1985), collecting his cartoons from Railroad magazine. I know the book-jacket biography of Fallberg is hard to read here, but give it a try.

Text copyright 2031 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

F.O. Alexander (1897-1993)

Here is an unusual book called Joe Doakes' Great Quest, written and drawn by F.O. Alexander and published in his retirement. Franklin Osborne Alexander was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 3, 1897. He attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and Northwestern University. During World War I, Alexander served with the Camouflage Engineers in Europe. (I think that outfit was more properly called the American Camouflage Corps.) In so doing he would have followed a path laid down by another artist, Abbott Thayer (1849-1921).

Alexander drew three newspaper comic strips between 1925 and 1939, the most well known of which was the cliffhanger Hairbreadth Harry. In 1941, he signed on with the Philadelphia Bulletin and enjoyed a second career as an editorial cartoonist. F.O. Alexander retired in 1967. The following year, John Knox Press of Richmond, Virginia, published his book Joe Doakes' Great Quest, a cartoon odyssey in which the title character tries to discover his purpose in life. The model is Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, but it looks like a sequential editorial cartoon. I suppose you could make something of a connection between editorial cartooning and literary allegory.

F.O. Alexander died on January 17, 1993, in Philadelphia at age ninety-five. His papers are at Syracuse University.

The cover design of Joe Doakes' Great Quest is by Doyle Robinson. The photo of the author is by William Conn.

Text copyright 2013 by 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