#literary-illustration

#literary-illustration

I was childless into my early forties. By then, my partner and I noticed that a lot of our peers were at a similar crossroads: dog, cat, or kid?

Yale came to me and said there isn't an overarching book about the history of printmaking; they wanted it to be about the printed image. There are a lot of books about printing-about the history of journalism or the history of books, the printing press and the printed word-but not so much about the printed image and its processes. So that was my challenge.

The texture of the material and the handcrafted quality were aspects that particularly interested them. The challenge was to translate my style from stone to paper.

Whenever you're working with an existing IP, there's always the question of how you're going to translate and adapt, right? Because it's not a one-to-one sort of interpretation.

To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul. The concept I stick to - my core principle - is simple: I write in plain English, and only when I actually have something to say.

I was very familiar with the history because I've been writing cocktail history for 25 years. For my last book before this one, I was the editor-in-chief and principal writer of the Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, a huge reference book that includes histories and biographies of famous bartenders, as well as other related information. So a lot of the information was pretty fresh in my mind.

Sophia Stewart poses a choice that many biographers struggle with: "what to do with the boring bits."

The studio is at my house within a ranch, surrounded by nature. It's on the second floor of the house, where there's better light. My routine all day shifts between studio work and housework, including outdoor garden work. I get up a bit before 7am, drink coffee in the yard, and get morning sunshine. Then my husband and I eat breakfast and do a bit of cleaning or some chores in the garden.

A writer is a kind of magician. Their job is to create living, three-dimensional people out of the ordinary stuff of ink and paper. This is no easy task, because readers can't literally hear, touch, or observe a character. Everything that defines a human being in real life-the physical space they occupy, or how they smell, feel, and sound-is stripped away, replaced by description. But authors have one major, mystical advantage: They can show you what's happening inside of someone's brain.