For the Love of Illustration | PRINT Magazine

 

Preserving one’s legacy, if only for one’s heirs, is a hard, tedious job. It is difficult enough balancing a checkbook (thank heavens for QuickBooks), no less balancing the physical evidence of a life’s accomplishments. I have boxes in attics, closets and cabinets of stuff that I worked on dating back to my late teens that a compulsive internal voice compelled me to save (and file away uncatalogued). I presume most of you dear readers have records of the past—snapshots, notebooks, scrapbooks, films, tapes, etc.—and with time, luck and a little management skill, you can find them. When I was working on my 2020 memoir Growing Up Underground, I was extremely lucky to locate much of the printed and written material I needed (saved over four decades, as though I somehow intuited I would someday write something about the 1960s). I assiduously collected and stored personal ephemera as though it were a justification of my existence. Yet as time passed I became less disciplined. Instead of a legitimate collector, I became a hoarder. Hoarding is accumulating mostly to acquire for its own sake, sans organization, categorization and curation. Collecting is purposeful.

 

Thanks to Beth Kleber, director of the SVA Milton Glaser Study Center and Archive, many linear feet worth of my research (rare and common) is now in a semblance of order, accessible to those who have the patience to go through it for scholarly (or other) pursuits. As I get increasingly older, I find there is increasingly more stuff that has accumulated—and disappeared. Last week Mirko Ilic posted a grid of The New York Times Book Review section covers he made when I was the art director. I don’t have one o them. I was so impressed by this rigor that I went back into what remains of hoardings that were disassembled when I moved into a new, smaller apartment. One of many things I had disposed of was a cache of Book Reviews that had grown over the 30 years I held the job—virtually a lifetime of work trashed by my own hand.

 

However, this hoarder is anything if not reluctant to dispose of things entirely. I found some 35mm slides that may come in handy if I do a Part 2 of my memoir, which would center on my love of illustration. They are among my favorite color covers for the special sections we used to do … and the illustrators could do whatever they wanted, as long as the result was smashing.