This was the first time I'd seen the work of Ed Emshwiller. It's part of an ad for a set of gummed bookplates ("100 for $5, 200, $7.50; 300, $10/With owner's name imprinted") on the inside front cover of an issue of
Galaxy. It impressed me twice. Once, with the slogan "No books are ever lost by loaning except ones you particularly want to keep." Words to live by for a lifetime. And also with the stunning line work and design of this illustration. My sixth-grade self set about drawing and re-drawing that robot design in short order. I didn't know who "Emsh" was, so I Googled it. No, I didn't really, this was 1967, when "googol" was still just a "1" with a hundred zeroes after it.
Probably through the
Dangerous Visions collections, I discovered that "Emsh" was merely the first syllable of a longer career. I tried to find Ed Emshwiller 's work in old magazines wherever I could, since I thought his design sense was like no one else's.
I saw his name again on Channel 13, when he was embarking on new artistic pursuits as an early visual artist, in the same stratum as Nam June Paik. Here's an article from
Vision News, or, alternately,
The Television Laboratory News, published at WNET/13. Diane English was the newsletter's editor.
