Brooks Wilson Strikes Back!

By guest author, Ken Steacy

Amazingly, a feature film based upon Brooks Wilson Ltd. was made in 1970. Titled ‘Loving’ (for no apparent reason!), it starred George Segal in the title role with support from Eva Marie Saint as his long-suffering wife, Keenan Wynn as his bullying agent, Sterling Hayden as the impossible client Mr. Lepridon, and Roy Scheider as the harried agency flack. The director was Irving Kershner, who George Lucas tapped a decade later to direct 'The Empire Strikes Back'!



It’s a condensed version of the same sad story: Brooks the hapless freelancer is torn between his artsy girlfriend in Manhattan and his family back home in (where else?) Westport Connecticut. A drunken tryst with a randy neighbour, televised by CCTV at a suburban Xmas party from hell, finally sinks him, and the film peters out as Brooks attempts to placate both the GF and his wife with news that he finally got the Lepridon account.



Early in the film Brooks discovers his agent has yet again locked himself in the bathroom, being too cheap to fix the doorknob. In the background we see plenty of tearsheets and stacks of originals, and it appears that the boxer illo bears the signature Brooks Wilson.









Back home, he hires a shapely model, who he poses in the livingroom - Brooks’ young daughter sits and reads a book during the session, his wife’s way of ensuring there’s no hanky-panky!



His agent’s smarmy underling arrives with a stack of illos, all of which require inane revisions ASAP. Brooks refuses, but this show of spine is more to impress the model, who he eyes with other than professional interest.









While in the city, Brooks gets bombed and makes a spectacle of himself at the ‘Artist’s Club’ which was actually shot at the Society of Illustrators in Manhattan. You can just make out their 60‘s-era logo on the coffee cups, as Brooks makes new friends (and enemies) over a multi-martini lunch.







Tomorrow: we bid farewell to the feckless Brooks Wilson, but not before he ably demonstrates his journeyman skills as an illustrator!

* We'd love to have your best guess at which artists where actually responsible for the prop artwork attributed to Brooks Wilson in the film. I'll get the ball rolling by ID'ing the "Bear Attack" illo, which I recognize as being by John McDermott, from a 1960 issue of Outdoor Life. ~ Leif

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BROOKS WILSON LTD. - The Paperback!

By guest author, Ken Steacy

Years ago, I discovered a remarkable novel titled Brooks Wilson Ltd. written in 1966 by J.M. Ryan. What initially attracted me to the book was the cover, adorned with one of Robert McGinnis’ best efforts; a wraparound that featured the titular hero (or anti-hero, as it turned out!) surrounded by a bevy of beauties.



But what made this book truly fascinating was that Brooks is a freelance illustrator, and the story concerns his trials and tribulations right when photography was ascendant, and the life of an illustrator was fraught with uncertainty - kinda like today!

A mid-level illustrator, Brooks struggles with work, his wife and kids, numerous affairs both real and imagined, the commute to NYC, and the ever-present bottle.



If he can just nail The Big Account (for Lepridon, a fictitious truckmaker) all will be well, but he’s kept on hold by his agent, who we discover has also been repping photographers. Guess who gets the account!

Most chapters open with notes from the agent, an obsequious nitwit whose concern is pleasing the client at all cost, Wilson’s mental, physical, and financial well-being notwithstanding. Typical comments:

"Brooks, they don’t feel the guy’s hat sits on his head right. It looks O.K. to me, but they feel it isn’t right. I don’t know what to tell you."

"Brooks, the client wasn’t happy with it and it ain’t gonna run after all. They want to know if you’ll play ball and settle for half price. You’ve gotta see their side of it."

"Brooks, as near as I can figure, you bitched up the job by doing what he told you to do."

The attention to detail about fees (usually paltry, with endless revisions built in), billing (90 days net!), and the cut-throat culture of the industry is quite amazing. Again, it’s weird how little has changed!



It turns out that J.M. Ryan is the pseudonym of Jim McDermott, an in-betweener at Disney way back in the 1930s. He obviously didn’t enjoyed the experience (he was there during the strike) and made that plain in his follow-up novel, The Rat Factory, a very unsubtle indictment of life working for The Mouse. Which begs the question; what was McDermott up to during the intervening decades, and just how autobiographical is Brooks Wilson Ltd.?

Tomorrow: Brooks Wilson Strikes Back, the feature film directed by Irving Kirshner!

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Walter H. Everett: "... a man preoccupied with his work to the detriment of his family life."

I had never heard of Walter H. Everett until his work was brought to my attention recently by Greg Newbold. Greg has published two posts on his blog showcasing Everett's work -- and what stunning work it is!

Everett has the dubious distinction of having one day burned all of the originals in his possession and abandoning illustration. Thank goodness some (but not much) of his work was out in the world at the time or none might have survived for us to enjoy today.

For instance, just look at the piece below, which I found in the photostream of Flickr member, Joseloff Gallery



Jim Vadeboncoeur has a short biography on Everett on his "Illustrators" web page. He writes that Everett was "described as a man preoccupied with his work to the detriment of his family life." And that after burning all his work, "he painted for himself until his death in 1946."

Below, a lovely example of Everett's personal work, painted the year before his death.



Be sure to visit Greg Newbold's blog to see many more examples of Walter H. Everett's gorgeous artwork. And drop by Jim Vadeboncoeur's webpage to read more about Everett and many other illustrator biographies.

* Thanks to Heritage Auctions for allowing me to use the second scan in today's post.

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Walter Wyles' Women

* An addendum to Friday's post on UK paperback cover art rates, by guest author Bryn Havord

At the beginning of the 1970s, although Walter Wyles was one of Britain's leading illustrators, he was faced with similar problems facing all illustrators; in simple terms; a declining market. With less and less fiction being published in women's magazines which had been his main source of income, he concentrated on book publishing, producing a substantial number of covers in the '70s, '80s and '90s.



His work was popular with the leading authors of the day, and he specialised in painting women's heads, which were very well received, not only here in the UK, but in Scandinavian countries such as Norway, Denmark and Sweden. He was able to produce highly finished work which fitted the changing needs of the art directors and art editors.



It was fortunate that the books that he had worked on sold very well, thereby satisfying the demands of the increasingly powerful and influential marketing and sales executives. His clients were especially pleased that he didn't use professional models, but what they called "real women". I'm not sure where he found them all, but his sons Nick and Glyn seemed to have a regular supply of nubile young women willing to pose!



Together with some of the other illustrators represented by his agent, they rented a studio every Friday night for what they called "evening classes". The idea was that they should employ models from all walks of life, so they could let themselves go and be really painterly, as a relief from the constraints of commercial illustration. Here are two of my favourites: Marje who was a character actress...



... and one of the Chelsea Pensioners, who were old soldiers who lived, and still do, at The Royal Hospital in London's Chelsea. They are still very much a part of the London scene around town in their distinctive bright red uniforms.



Walter was also a successful portrait painter at the time, and even now at 86 years-of-age, he accepts the odd commission, and paints every day.

(Below, a selection of Walter Wyles' original art from various paperback covers)





















* Previous posts on Walter Wyles' career by Bryn Havord:

Walter Wyles: "...my oldest and closest friend."

Walter Wyles: "he decided that he wanted to be a magazine illustrator"

Walter Wyles: "... at the top of his profession"

Walter Wyles: Across the Pond

Walter Wyles: "...something out of the ordinary"

* Walter Wyles Illustration Archive on Flickr

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Paper Back Cover Rates: "The Poor UK Relations"

Yesterday Bryn Havord, who has guest-authored several series of posts on TI, wrote to me about my recent series on the economics of the mid-century illustration industry. Bryn had so much interesting, invaluable information to share regarding related trends in the UK, I thought it would make a terrific follow-up post. Many thanks to Bryn, who also very graciously provided a wealth of related cover art scans to accompany his remarks. ~ Leif

UK Paper Back Cover Art: Rates and Trends by Guest Author, Bryn Havord


Trends were very much the same here in the UK, although the fees paid were, of course, different to those paid in the USA: we in the UK were always the poor relations.



As in America, in the mid 1960s here, TV started to seriously damage ad revenues in magazines, paginations went down, and there was a decline in interest in fiction in the women's magazines.



When I left my job as associate editor and art director of Woman's Mirror magazine, I went to work in national daily newspapers. The main reason for my decision was that I didn't like the way marketing and sales departments were starting to influence the type of illustration used, and the trend to use more photography to illustrate some of what little fiction was still being published.



This trend was even more serious in paperback book publishing. I thought that the early to mid '60s was really exciting with the variety of work being produced by illustrators here in the UK and the USA. In particular, Bernie Fuchs, Bob Peak and Robert Heindel and so many others in the USA, and Walter Wyles, Michael Johnson and Brian Sanders, and so many others, here in the UK.



For five years from 1960 until 1965, I found every working day highly charged with excitement. Not only with the work I was doing, and the work I was commissioning from British artists, and with the second rights material available from the US. Moreover, going into W H Smiths, our main newsagents and paperback book sellers, was a must every week as we didn't want to miss any of the terrific work being published in the magazines, newspapers and paperback books.





As a rough guide, in the sixties the average fee for a paperback cover was £100.00: in the seventies £350.00, and in the eighties £750.00. These were not giant leaps forward, but merely keeping pace with inflation. (If I remember correctly there were $2.40 US to £1.00 in the mid '60s, and today it's around $1.60 US to £1.00.)



Furthermore, not many of us were as fortunate as our America cousins when if came to rights. It was pretty rare for any of us to retain any reproduction rights, with syndication departments of magazine and paperback publishers selling the rights to our work many times over.



Brian Sanders has just told me, which I had forgotten, that the most serious influence on paperback book art directors were the sales and marketing departments. If a book achieved impressive sales, the next few books had to look the same. Increasingly, photographs were being used. Those specifically commissioned by art directors were good, but the increasing trend was to buy stock photographs which, of course, were cheaper, and easier to obtain.

I know from experience, that commissioning art work from illustrators is a highly skilled job, and I hear that there are not many art directors today, who are possessed of the necessary skills.

I attach two examples: a variety of paperback covers produced in the '60s using illustrations...



... and some recently published paperbacks using photographs.



I'm sure that you will see the variety in Brian Sander's work, even for two books in the same series (the Monica Dickens covers), as well as the variety of the work produced by the other illustrators who include Walter Wyles and Michael Johnson.

Don't you think the illustrations and covers produced over 45 years ago knock spots off the recent photographic crap?

Oh well, that's progress!

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Paperback Cover Rates: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

In case I've left you with the impression that the end of the Golden Age of magazine illustration meant that there was no call for illustration after 1960 -- and that all the great magazine artists of the mid-20th century either moved out west or became photographers -- well, nothing could be further from the truth.



Although their traditional market was never again the same, a new market for illustration - especially 'realistic' illustration - was growing by leaps and bounds: paperback cover art. And that market had an almost insatiable appetite for new illustrations.



Even in the early 1950s, the paperback publishers were putting 1,200 new titles on the stands each year, according to a 1953 Fortune magazine article. That's 1,200 new illustration assignments per year, and the numbers only got bigger a decade later.



No surprise then that quite a few magazine illustrators had already made paperback cover art a regular part of their income during the '50s (and some even during the '40s).



In "The Book of Paperbacks" author Piet Schreuders documents the pay rates for cover art over this period. "The normal fee for a single cover was $100 - 125 around 1945," writes Schreuders.



"In the '50s, prices ranges from $200 to $250, although the really big names (Avati at Signet, Tom Dunn at Pocket Books, Ben Stahl at Bantam) received $500 - $1,000."



What's so interesting for me about that statement is that there were a few - not many, but a few - illustrators in the paperback market of the 1950s who could make as much per painting as they would doing mainstream magazine illustration.

For the others (the majority) the price Schreuders documents jibes well with what Mitchell Hooks described to me when I interviewed him a few years ago. Mitchell told me that covers went for about $300 when he began painting them in the early 50's...



... and that as a member of the Graphic Artists Guild he worked to encourage publishers to pay better rates. After a few years, the average cover was going for $800.



In a small press publication from 1988 called "Paperback Parade," Hooks told interviewer/editor Gary Lovisi, "I sure never got rich doing covers, but it paid the rent."



Continued Hooks, "For about 15 or 20 years that's all I did. There wasn't much other work around."



When I asked Harry Borgman about his experience in paperback cover art he wrote back, "I did a few paperbacks from 1965 to 1973, probably a total of 12 or 15. For most of them I was paid $900, the first ones were a bit lower."



And Will Davies, with whom I shared studio space in Toronto, did over 500 covers for Harlequin Romance over the course of a quarter century. When Will began painting them in the early '70s "they started out at about $800 or $900 but gradually we got the price up to where it ought to have been: around $2,500 each."



Will did two or three covers a month - every month. That's not a bad gig if you can get regular assignments like Will did.



Original illustration art dealer, Mitch Itkowitz represents the work of many artists who did paperback covers. Mitch told me, "I think Max Ginsburg, back when he was still in the PB market, wanted to sell his cover paintings for what he was paid. At that time, in the late 80's/early 90's, it was in the $2000-2500 range."



And when I previously wrote about paperback cover rates in 2008, I asked my friend René Milot how much he has been paid in recent years for book covers.



René told me that he had received as much as $5,000 for a cover from a major publisher... but that price had actually dropped in recent years. As of that writing, $2,500 once again was more typical.

But here's the fascinating thing: if we take $2,500 and, with the help of our handy online calculator, reverse-adjust it for inflation into 1950s dollars, it comes to...



... Mitchell Hooks' $300 cover rate from 1952.



* Many thanks to Mitch Itkowitz for the Mitchell Hooks original art scan directly above. This piece is currently available at graphiccollectibles.com

* Many thanks to my Flickr friend, Uilke (AKA UK Vintage) for allowing me to use many of his cover scans in today's post. Visit Uilke's Flickr archives to see thousands of stunning vintage paperback covers

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