EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 25 © 2019 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

3 Our initial intent of just restricting ourselves to great European art was soon discarded in favour of covering US as well as UK and European illustration. There was a natural bias towards traditional figurative illustration, but not at the expense of ignoring great contemporary illustrators. Our church was to be a broad one—as long as it was great art we would happily feature it. Having set our compass in terms of what we wanted to achieve, there came the minor matter of how we could make this work. Bearing in mind that we needed a strong masthead and overall design to add the necessary authority to illustrators , this involved much trial and error. We eventually arrived at a logo and masthead, which was semi-serviceable, but the masthead was still not 100% convincing. The answer to the problem along with a lot of other problems cropped up on Leif Peng’s illustration blog-fest, ‘Today’s Inspiration’, when I chanced upon the postings of one of Leif’s guest presenters, Bryn Havord. Bryn, as I was about to discover, was a veteran of Fleet Street’s golden era, when fees to illustrators of large circulation magazines were still generous. Bryn had been art editor of a variety of women’s magazines throughout the 1960s and had commissioned some of the top illustrators on both sides of theAtlantic. I sent Bryn an email telling him how much I had enjoyed reading his postings and asking him if he might, possibly, consider writing for us? Not only did Bryn agree to write for us, but he involved himself in every aspect of illustrators production. Under his jaundiced eye, I commenced a period of tutelage on the finer aspects of adding credibility and conviction to our publication with the objective of not only making illustrators stimulating in terms of the way we presented artists, but also easy for the reader to navigate. Bryn was not only fun to work with, but he was also passionate about illustration and had maintained a lot of his old contacts. As a result we had first hand access to a lot of artists whose work we could present using optimum quality scans as well as benefiting from Bryn’s anecdote- laden texts, which added further insight into the art. However, Bryn’s fatalistic observations about having attained an age when it was no longer wise to buy ‘long- life milk’ and, “I won’t always be here to look over your shoulder, so sharpen up your act, my boy”, proved to be sadly all too prescient and his tenure on illustrators was curtailed by his unexpected death in the summer of 2014. He had been a huge influence on illustrators and he was (and is) sorely missed by the team. It was a book review on Amazon which led me to the next creative force to have a big influence on illustrators . I read a review of a volume reprinting issues of Vampirella , and for the first time came across someone who was writing about the diverse Spanish talents that had worked on one of the most memorable of James Warren’s horror magazines and, very much as I had done with Bryn, I invited the reviewer to write some features for us. Diego Cordoba was the man of the moment and, as I suspected, Diego also had first- hand knowledge of the artists he was writing about and the talent to put across their stories in a lively and informative way. Like Bryn, he also had experience of editing and handling layouts, loved what we were doing and happily came on board with us. It is Diego who currently edits this fine journal and under his careful stewardship it is continuing to present some of the finest art dedicated to the realisation of worlds presented in words. I am currently taking a backseat, but I am working on parallel projects under the illustrators imprint and I look forward to sharing them with you over the next few months. ● GEOFF WEST: All the artists were completely new to me. PETER RICHARDSON: This is the art I grew up with. DIEGO CORDOBA: The shark cover and Doré, the greatest illustrator. DAVE HOWARTH: The next one! Issue 20 Special Issue 2: War is Hell! Issue 17 Issue ??? Which has been your favourite issue so far and why?