Episodes we love: Artist Known

New to Endless Thread? Wooooo! We're revisiting some favorites from our archives to welcome you. First up: The cover art for the 1976 paperback edition of Madeleine L'Engle's classic, spooky sci-fi/fantasy novel "A Wrinkle in Time" — featuring a rainbow-winged centaur and a green, glowering, red-eyed face — is iconic. And yet, for nearly 50 years, no one has known who illustrated it. Well, not NO ONE. Not anymore... Endless Thread cracks the case!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot, designed to keep you connected, powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month, or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 1:03Amory Sivertson?

  Ben Brock Johnson.

• 1:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Emery Severson.

• 1:05Amory Sivertson?

  Happy spooky week!

• 1:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Woo!

• 1:11Amory Sivertson?

  So people who've been listening to Endless Thread for a while will know that we have a tradition of doing at least one, sometimes a whole handful of spooky episodes as Halloween approaches. And we call it...

• 1:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Dread.

• 1:24Amory Sivertson?

  Yes. So this year's installment of Endless Dread is coming out on Friday.

• 1:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  But in the meantime, we thought we'd drop an extra little something, something for the new listeners, people who have just maybe found our show through Hidden Levels, the series we just wrapped up with 99% Invisible.

• 1:43Amory Sivertson?

  And if that's you, welcome, welcome. As you may have heard, Endless Thread is a show where we dig into wild and fascinating stories from the internet. Some of those are more personal experiences, sometimes they're untold histories, sometimes they're unsolved mysteries, and sometimes they're all three.

• 2:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Like the one we have for you today. We are revisiting an episode, one of the best, from our archives. Archives that has to do with a very famous book and its very famous book cover made by the artist. And nobody knows, they're not famous, turns out, except they're about to be, maybe.

• 2:24Amory Sivertson?

  So we hope you enjoy this episode and then we hope you'll meet us back here on Friday for Endless Dread.

• 2:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  See you soon.

• 2:46Speaker 05

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 2:57Amory Sivertson?

  It was a dark and stormy night.

• 3:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  For real? This is, this is how you're gonna kick this off?

• 3:04Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, it's a mystery. And it's, well, you'll see.

• 3:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  Whatever you say, Ama.

• 3:11Amory Sivertson?

  You ready? It was a dark and stormy night.

• 3:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  I mean, I'm pretty sure it was a sunny spring afternoon, but okay.

• 3:19Amory Sivertson?

  Thank you for doing this.

• 3:20Speaker 06

  No problem. I'm so excited.

• 3:22Amory Sivertson?

  When we met Sarah Elizabeth.

• 3:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  I feel like I haven't talked to a blogger in a minute.

• 3:29Speaker 06

  That's because nobody blogs anymore. At least, nobody reads blogs anymore, which is really sad.

• 3:35Amory Sivertson?

  Sarah does indeed have a blog called Unquiet Things for Kindred Blooms, which tells you a little about her, right? And people do read her blog, but there's one entry Sarah wrote back in May that's gotten a lot of attention.

• 3:51Speaker 06

  More hits than I've ever gotten in an entire decade of 20 years of writing.

• 3:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  And a lot of those hits have come from Redditors. Sarah shared this specific blog post in a handful of subreddits recently because she needed help. She came up against something in the midst of her writing, her rather niche writing, we should say.

• 4:12Speaker 06

  My first book was The Art of the Occult. My second book came out last year. It's The Art of Darkness. And then in September of this year, The Art of Fantasy will be published. And that kind of gets into this whole mystery today.

• 4:31Amory Sivertson?

  Sarah was doing research for that latest book. And for a couple of years, this one fantasy book cover kept popping into her mind's eye.

• 4:42Speaker 06

  It's in these hypersaturated, really lurid colors.

• 4:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Greens and blues of every shade, seafoam, cerulean.

• 4:53Speaker 06

  And there's like a face. It's this green-skinned, really grim, just wants to suck all the life and joy out of you kind of face.

• 5:07Amory Sivertson?

  The face is a sickly witchy green, floating, bodyless in a cloudy blue orb. A vertical crease runs down its forehead, giving it an alien quality, along with its sunken chin and deep-set eyes that glow bright red.

• 5:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's very handsome. It's a handsome face is what you're trying to say.

• 5:28Speaker 06

  That face just glowering at you. It's kind of terrifying.

• 5:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  Can confirm hovering above that joy-sucking face.

• 5:38Speaker 06

  There's a man, Pegasus hybrid.

• 5:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  A winged centaur, if you will.

• 5:46Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, with a human face that looks cut from marble and a torso like a Greek god attached to an equally chiseled horse's lower half, suspended by these delicate, almost contradictory rainbow pastel wings.

• 6:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's the thing that pops out to me where I'm like, no, this doesn't work. These are like hummingbird wings on a 700-pound horse body.

• 6:11Amory Sivertson?

  Up until that point, it was all believable to you.

• 6:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:17Speaker 06

  I find the colors of the cover and the painting so freaky. And I could not tell you why. They just cause this weird, low-level hum that's really just full of dread in my heart.

• 6:33Amory Sivertson?

  But for Sarah, a self-proclaimed gloom and, "fancier of magics both macabre and melancholy," as her blog proclaims, a painting that can induce a low-level hum of dread in your heart? That's a pretty exciting thing. Sarah wanted to include this piece in her forthcoming book, The Art of Fantasy, but...

• 6:55Speaker 06

  I couldn't even remember what it was from.

• 6:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  As in, Sarah didn't know what book this cover belonged to. But that is not the mystery here anymore. A quick internet search reminded her that it was the cover of a 1976 paperback edition of Madeleine Lengel's young adult sci-fi fantasy novel, A Wrinkle in Time.

• 7:16Amory Sivertson?

  The opening line of which is...

• 7:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  "It was a dark and stormy night." Okay, all right, all right.

• 7:22Amory Sivertson?

  Remember that old classic?

• 7:24Speaker 06

  Honestly, the only thing I really remember in the book is that someone ate a liverwurst sandwich.

• 7:33Amory Sivertson?

  All right, Sarah is no help at all, but the book is about three kids tessering, or wrinkling, time and space, on a quest to find a father gone mysteriously missing, and to fight an evil force trying to rid the world of originality and autonomy.

• 7:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  What does that have to do with the glowering, red-eyed face and a ripped, rainbow-winged Pegasus Centaur? It might feel like a mystery for the uninitiated, but it's still not our mystery.

• 8:04Amory Sivertson?

  Nope. The real question, the one that would prevent Sarah from being able to include this haunting illustration for A Wrinkle in Time in her fantasy art book, is who painted it?

• 8:17Speaker 06

  And I thought, oh, pish posh. Surely, I'm going to find this, like, in the first page of Google. No. No, no, no.

• 8:26Amory Sivertson?

  The answer isn't on any page of Google, or any page of the physical book itself. Not the copyright page where the rest of the credit info is, not the front cover or back cover, nowhere.

• 8:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  Sarah posed the question in the Unresolved Mysteries subreddit and got hundreds of replies, many of which said, "Hey, that's the cover of the copy I had growing up."

• 8:48Amory Sivertson?

  Which is cool, but despite how iconic this illustration seemed to be...

• 8:53Speaker 06

  Nobody knows who the cover artist for this book is.

• 9:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  But there are two kinds of people in this world. People who hear "nobody knows" and think, huh, I guess nobody knows.

• 9:08Amory Sivertson?

  And people who think,

• 9:10Speaker 06

  uh-uh, no way. Uh-uh, I'm gonna find it.

• 9:12Amory Sivertson?

  Or, I'm gonna find someone who can find it. Or, in this case, someone who can help me find someone who can find it.

• 9:20Speaker 06

  And it was subsequent redditors from that post who said, oh, try this subreddit. Oh, try this one. And that's, that's how I got to you guys.

• 9:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  A redditor who goes by Nutella Time

• 9:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  replied to Sarah's post with the comment, "This would be the kind of thing that the folks over at Endless Thread would have a field day over."

• 9:44Amory Sivertson?

  Nah, that doesn't sound like us, does it, Ben? Pish posh! I responded to Sarah's post, saying, "I have at least one string I'd like to pull on this."

• 9:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  And that was eight months ago.

• 9:58Amory Sivertson?

  It was a solid, like, four months ago, actually. And little did I know, that string would lead to another, and another, and another, until I was on my own, full-blown, yeah, four-months-long quest through time and space to find an artist credit gone mysteriously missing. And to understand the forces that have left this cover's artist, and countless others, unknown for decades.

• 10:33Speaker 06

  These artists deserve recognition, and, you know, people need to know their names.

• 10:40Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Amory Sivertson.

• 10:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread.

• 10:44Amory Sivertson?

  We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR-distributing, mystery-solving credit where it's due-giving station.

• 10:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Today's episode?

• 10:55Amory Sivertson?

  Artist known.

• 11:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Sarah Elizabeth had already done a fair amount of digging into this mystery by the time she wrote her various posts about the Wrinkle in Time cover. She'd consulted something called the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, an online catalog of works of sci-fi fantasy and horror that usually has answers to these kinds of questions, but not this time.

• 11:32Amory Sivertson?

  She'd scrolled through listicles showing the nearly two dozen different covers for A Wrinkle in Time since it was first published in 1962. One of them, from the site Book Riot, ranks the covers. The 1976 paperback comes in third, and it's accompanied by this conversational caption that reads, "Publisher." "So, did you finish that kid's book cover I told you to illustrate, with the rainbows and the centaur and outer space?"

• 11:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Artist. Sure did. Absolute nightmare fuel, just like you asked.

• 12:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Other listicles name the artists behind the different covers, but when you get to this 1976 one, you see, "Artist unknown."

• 12:17Amory Sivertson?

  Sarah also DM'd A Wrinkle in Time author Madeline Langle's granddaughter on Twitter.

• 12:22Speaker 06

  All I got back was a shrug emoji, so she doesn't know either, apparently.

• 12:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  So Sarah didn't have too much to work with, but also, there was something getting in her way.

• 12:32Speaker 06

  I'm very shy, and I don't like meeting people or talking to people or interacting with people. So I'm like, I kind of felt I had a mission, except I'm not so dedicated to my mission that I'll make a phone call. That's where I draw the line.

• 12:47Amory Sivertson?

  But as I told Sarah, where she draws the line is where I pick up the line. You know what I'm saying?

• 12:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Pish posh.

• 12:54Amory Sivertson?

  I am a professional pain in the ass, and I will pick up the phone and call anyone. I will call all of their surviving children and I will, I will try to get to that person. Well, with this mystery technically pushing 50, I knew it was going to take some time to solve. But I took a little inspiration from A Wrinkle in Time itself because over the course of our conversation with Sarah, more of the plot of the book did start coming back to her, specifically how one wrinkles time.

• 13:24Speaker 06

  They explained it as you're holding a string between your hands. And when you bring the string together, these points, two points come together and that's how we travel.

• 13:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  A string folded in half, bringing point A and point B together almost instantaneously. That's how you wrinkle time.

• 13:45Amory Sivertson?

  And that's what I was going to have to do if I didn't want another 50 years to go by before this mystery got solved. Wrangling time in this case meant going straight to the source. Because despite the many steps Sarah had outlined in her very thorough post, she made no mention of the particular source that my head first went to when I saw this cover. A source printed on the cover itself. Four tiny letters running vertically along the binding. D E L L.

• 14:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  Dell Publishing.

• 14:17Amory Sivertson?

  That's the string I wanted to pull or fold or wrinkle when I responded to Sarah's post. We needed to reach the right person at Dell. Except.

• 14:30Amory Sivertson?

  Dell doesn't exist anymore. Not really, because the publishing world is one of acquisitions, almost to a comical extent.

• 14:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  Dell was acquired by Doubleday the same year this paperback edition came out. Doubleday was acquired by Bertelsmann, who formed Bentham Doubleday Dell. Bertelsmann acquired Random House, then Random House merged with Penguin, making Penguin Random House.

• 14:50Amory Sivertson?

  Bravo. All of which is to say, reaching someone at the publishing house formerly known as Dell was going to be its own exercise in time travel. Potentially into some dusty old Dell records that had changed hands several times already. I was hopeful this would turn up something, until the one person within the Penguin Random House machine I was told would know if such records existed responded with,

• 15:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  We no longer have these extremely old files. Good luck to all who are curious.

• 15:26Amory Sivertson?

  So, when paper records fail, it's time to dig into the human records, Ben.

• 15:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Ugh.

• 15:33Amory Sivertson?

  AKA, it's time to message some randos on LinkedIn who have any iteration of Dell publishing listed on their resumes.

• 15:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mmm, that sounds like a lot of fun.

• 15:42Amory Sivertson?

  You know, I did have a lot of fun on this journey. Especially because that led me to someone named Judy Gittenstein, editor, writing coach, secret weapon, which is her actual email signature.

• 15:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  What?

• 15:55Amory Sivertson?

  But it's also-

• 15:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  Does it say it on her business card?

• 15:57Amory Sivertson?

  Probably. I don't, you know, we were emailers. We were email buds.

• 16:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  Fair.

• 16:01Amory Sivertson?

  But it is true. She was a secret weapon because Judy pointed me to-

• 16:07Speaker 07

  Bruce Hall.

• 16:09Amory Sivertson?

  Bruce Hall is a New Yorker, clearly.

• 16:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  New Yorker.

• 16:14Amory Sivertson?

  New Yorker. But he was also the art director for Dell at the time this paperback edition of Wrinkle in Time came out.

• 16:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Aha.

• 16:22Amory Sivertson?

  And he, yeah, he remembered it.

• 16:24Speaker 07

  It was a beautiful painting for that, for that title.

• 16:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  And did he remember who did that beautiful painting?

• 16:31Speaker 07

  I wish I could, you know, this is going to drive me nuts now.

• 16:35Amory Sivertson?

  I know. Welcome to the club.

• 16:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  To be fair, we are going back almost 50 years here.

• 16:43Speaker 07

  We're in ancient history now.

• 16:46Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, but Bruce is the guy who would have commissioned this- Sprinkle in time cover. Surely I could jog his memory, right? So I started reading off the names of some of the artists that had been left in the comments of Sarah's posts. Names like Milo Sintron.

• 17:02Speaker 07

  It's similar, but I don't think it's Milo.

• 17:05Amory Sivertson?

  Does the name Ray Fiebush or Fiebush mean anything?

• 17:08Speaker 07

  No, no, it does not.

• 17:10Amory Sivertson?

  Charles Santory?

• 17:12Speaker 07

  Yes, I'm familiar with him, but I, I don't think it was him.

• 17:15Amory Sivertson?

  Or maybe John Leon Hewens, who is one of my guesses after spending hours and hours looking at sci-fi and fantasy art from the 70s?

• 17:24Speaker 07

  Hewens is a more delicate painter than this, you know, so the styles are not comparable at all.

• 17:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, Emery, come on, the styles aren't comparable at all.

• 17:37Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, pish posh. But my name game maybe wasn't totally hopeless because Bruce eventually came up with a name himself that he wanted me to look into.

• 17:48Speaker 07

  Uh, Bober?

• 17:50Amory Sivertson?

  Bober, Richard Bober. I looked him up immediately, of course, and I found a site with an image gallery of his work.

• 17:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  And did you see centaurs and handsome, terrifying, glowering faces and greens and blues galore?

• 18:07Amory Sivertson?

  Far from it, Ben, far from it. There were studies of nude women and

• 18:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 18:14Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, realistic paintings of ladies in these elegant gowns. There were fiery oranges and peachy pink color palettes, pencil sketches, pirates with rugged faces.

• 18:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  This doesn't sound right. Did any of them, did any of them have ridiculously small wings on them?

• 18:35Amory Sivertson?

  Not a one, but as we've established, I'm not the visual art expert here. But yeah, I took one spin through that portfolio of Richard Bober's and I was like, okay, Bruce, I think you got the wrong guy.

• 18:53Amory Sivertson?

  Richard Bober died late last year, but there was contact info for his agent on this site. So I told Bruce I'd reach out and let him know what I heard.

• 19:04Speaker 07

  You've got some interesting roads to go down. Anyway, I have to give you credit for being dogged with this boy. You're really...

• 19:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  A professional pain in the ass?

• 19:14Amory Sivertson?

  You know, he never finished that sentence. But I sort of had to be, you know? The paper publishing record of who this artist is was gone. And Bruce really felt like my best shot. If he couldn't think of the artist, who could?

• 19:31Speaker 07

  I'll wake up tonight and, you know, it'll come to me, I think.

• 19:34Amory Sivertson?

  Hey, if it comes to you in the middle of the night, you call me, okay? You call me, because there's a good chance that I'm lying awake too, thinking, who is it? Who is it?

• 19:44Speaker 07

  That's a promise.

• 19:47Amory Sivertson?

  Meanwhile, I officially gave up on Wrinkling Time. I was casting as wide a net as possible, making calls and sending dozens of emails a day to places like the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists, the Society of Illustrators, the Children's Book Council, and so many more. Artists, archivists, auctioners, collectors, no lead left behind. Hello, is this Marietta? Speaking. Hi, this is Fred. Hello. Hi, is this Jeff? Yes. I was thinking of this guy whose name is John Pallenkar. I have a feeling Jerry would be the ultimate person. This mystery was resurrecting something for people. Names they hadn't heard or thought about in a long time.

• 20:31Amory Sivertson?

  Colleagues they hadn't spoken to in decades. He's one of those people who I remember from 40 years ago. More ideas and artist names, more people talking to each other about this and sharing the mystery further and wider. A well-known sci-fi artist named Michael Whalen tweeted it out to his nearly 20,000 followers, which then generated hundreds of retweets and comments and new leads. It got picked up by the popular science fiction site Tor.com. People seemed really energized, but I wasn't getting answers. Uh... I don't know who it is. Good luck to you. It would be a long shot.

• 21:15Amory Sivertson?

  Although I did get a response from Jane Frank, the agent of Richard Bober, the artist that Bruce Hall thought might have painted the cover.

• 21:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  "Who knew that sleuthing for one cover could reach such epic proportions?" she wrote.

• 21:28Amory Sivertson?

  Followed by,

• 21:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  "It's definitely not Bober."

• 21:31Amory Sivertson?

  I'd emailed Bober's previous agent, too, Jill Baumann. "It's not Richard Bober," Jill agreed. I felt simultaneously validated in my assessment of Richard Bober's work and deflated. But I called Bruce back. Okay, can you still hear me? Yes. This time from a road trip over Memorial Day weekend. I gave him the bad news about Bober, but I also had a new list of names to run by him. Maybe that could help us shake something loose in the old memory bank here. Eventually, it did.

• 22:05Speaker 07

  I think the artist agent was a guy named Darwin Baum.

• 22:11Amory Sivertson?

  He-- sorry, sorry. Who's agent in particular?

• 22:14Speaker 07

  The artist who did that cover that we're looking for.

• 22:18Amory Sivertson?

  Really? Bruce told me, as the art director at Dell, he was mostly working with the agents, not the artists themselves. He and Darwin went way back. Do we think he is still alive, or likely no?

• 22:32Speaker 07

  I doubt it. I doubt it very much.

• 22:35Amory Sivertson?

  But like I told Sarah I would, I left messages for Darwin, his wife, and any and all children and relatives I could find for Darwin Baum online. I'm trying to reach Donald Mahoney, the Donald Mahoney who is connected to Sarah Ann Mahoney and the Sarah Ann Mahoney who is related to Darwin Baum. It got a little nuts.

• 22:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Clearly.

• 22:59Amory Sivertson?

  But if Bruce is right that Darwin represented the artist who painted the mystery cover of A Wrinkle in Time, and if he's still alive, this cover might not be a mystery for much longer.

• 23:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  More in a minute.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 23:55Speaker 07

  Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected, powered by Verizon's 5G network, and no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month, or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details. When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's Fall Drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy-to-layer styles meet the demands of your day.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you.

• 25:10Amory Sivertson?

  The Lululemon Fall Lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.

• 25:24Amory Sivertson?

  Great news, Ben. Yeah, this is Darwin Baum. I was recommended to...

• 25:30Speaker 07

  Amory by Bruce Hall.

• 25:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  He's alive.

• 25:35Amory Sivertson?

  Yes. Darwin, the guy Bruce Hall thinks represented the mystery Wrinkle in Time artist, is alive and 94 years young. Bad news, he doesn't recognize our mystery cover, and therefore doesn't think it was one of his artists who painted it. Bruce was befuddled.

• 25:56Speaker 07

  I remember using this guy frequently, Darwin's top artist. And for the life of me, I thought that was Boba, but you know, maybe not.

• 26:05Amory Sivertson?

  My human records were failing me, so I went back to paper records. Really, we did. Check, check, check, check.

• 26:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  Check, check, check, check. To Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Wrinkle in Time author Madeleine Lengel's alma mater and the keeper of boxes and boxes of her papers and letters in a very, very nice, hermetically sealed top floor of just like beautiful, beautiful library. This folder is professional correspondence of the 1970s.

• 26:43Amory Sivertson?

  Yep.

• 26:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Requests and appreciation from publishers. We were tearing through these boxes.

• 26:48Amory Sivertson?

  As much as one can in a pin drop, quiet, studious archival library.

• 26:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Thinking maybe somewhere in them, there was a mention of the artist who illustrated the 1976 paperback edition, maybe?

• 27:02Amory Sivertson?

  Who are these people?

• 27:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  I think they're just like contacts.

• 27:06Amory Sivertson?

  What?

• 27:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's like a contact list.

• 27:08Amory Sivertson?

  But we had a very small window of time to work with and some appropriately strict rules to follow.

• 27:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  You can't take anything out of there right now.

• 27:17Amory Sivertson?

  Why not?

• 27:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  Because you can only take one thing out at a time and we have a folder out already.

• 27:22Amory Sivertson?

  Okay. I was stressing.

• 27:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, you did show up like an hour and a half late, so. That's usually my move. We really swapped roles that day.

• 27:35Amory Sivertson?

  We did, but some things stay the same. And that is that I was very stressed. Ben was.

• 27:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  You can look, but no touchy.

• 27:43Amory Sivertson?

  He was being Ben.

• 27:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  There's a lot of bill course. Correspondence to, and there's some, there's some very confusing correspondence between, from bill to bill.

• 27:52Amory Sivertson?

  All right, what I would like to do.

• 27:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Just keep going, just keep going. You're doing great.

• 27:58Amory Sivertson?

  The idea of the, you know, the needle in a haystack expression is that you know that the needle is in there. You just have to be patient enough to go through the whole haystack. But this is like a needle in some haystack, but we, we might, we might not be anywhere near the actual haystack.

• 28:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, let's go get some vegan pizza.

• 28:22Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, please. It's the only thing that has made me not look, totally lose my will to live in this very moment.

• 28:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Sorry.

• 28:34Amory Sivertson?

  Ben, with every mystery we've ever worked on, there comes a time when we ask ourselves a very important question.

• 28:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  Where does Amory get her vegan pizza?

• 28:46Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, we can talk about that later. I'm happy to share that. I know all the spots.

• 28:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  No, I, the question is, is this actually solvable?

• 28:55Amory Sivertson?

  Right. Will we ever know for sure who illustrated this cover?

• 29:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  My guess is that we will not.

• 29:04Amory Sivertson?

  This is Adam Rowe, and that is obviously not what I wanted to hear. Adam is the guy behind the hugely popular Twitter account 70s Sci-Fi Art and author of the hot off the press Worlds Beyond Time Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s. And he told me why we may never know who did this cover, or many others for that matter.

• 29:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  The illustrations are seen as the, you know, the marketing, commercial selling point of the book. And much like a lot of advertisers weren't credited, they wouldn't credit the cover artists either. Think about the last time you saw a movie poster you loved, or an album cover, or a logo. These kinds of artists for higher jobs often mean that someone's work goes admired, but not attributed.

• 29:52Amory Sivertson?

  That's just business, you might say. But in this case, the artists' names could so easily have been printed somewhere, anywhere on the books their illustrations adorned.

• 30:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  Certainly, the, the people that I speak to today, pretty uniformly don't.

• 30:08Amory Sivertson?

  Like are upset about lack of credit in the cases where they weren't given any. And something to be even more upset about, some of the artists that weren't credited for their illustrations also never got their original paintings back. At the time, the industry practice was kind of to just buy the art outright rather

• 30:28Speaker 05

  than to buy the rights to the art. So they would just own the art, but they didn't want it around, so they'd just take it out to the alley and burn it all.

• 30:37Amory Sivertson?

  No.

• 30:38Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 30:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Publishers burning paintings? That sounds dramatic.

• 30:46Amory Sivertson?

  I know, but Adam wasn't the only person to tell me about artists not getting their originals back. And if the original for the cover of this edition of A Wrinkle in Time was among the ones that were destroyed or just ditched, that's certainly going to make it a lot harder to confirm its origins. The industry did shift to just buying the rights, and if you only buy the rights, you should be returning the artwork. And sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. Despair settled like a stone in the pit of my stomach.

• 31:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  That also sounds dramatic.

• 31:18Amory Sivertson?

  Just quoting from A Wrinkle in Time again, but yeah, this was a low moment because one of the really special things about making art of any kind, at least to me, is that it outlives you. And that doesn't necessarily mean that this artist would want a whole song and dance about them, but the fact that I can pick up a copy of this edition of the book, which I did, by the way, and stare into those red eyes and not know who painted them, is frankly, pretty sad. And wanting to fix something and not knowing if you actually can is also pretty sad.

• 31:57Amory Sivertson?

  But my conversation with Adam Rowe wasn't all dark and stormy vibes.

• 32:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, phew, this is bumming me out. I was gonna have to go for pizza round two.

• 32:07Amory Sivertson?

  Well, Adam had a theory of his own about who might have done the mystery cover, an artist he'd really zeroed in on. And since he's an aficionado of 70s sci-fi art, I was like, yes, Adam, bring it.

• 32:21Speaker 05

  I will say, Richard Bober sure does look like a really good candidate.

• 32:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Bober, the guy Bruce, the art director, thinks did it.

• 32:29Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, but also the guy whose agent Jane Frank told me it definitely was not. And Adam knows Jane, and he says he trusts her on this.

• 32:39Speaker 05

  That is definitely a pretty serious blow against the theory, but...

• 32:43Amory Sivertson?

  But like Bruce Hall, I couldn't get Adam off of it. He reminded me of a Twitter thread I'd seen from a guy named Wallace Pulsom, also suggesting Bober. A thread that I'd set aside after Jane said no, honestly. But it pointed out the similarities between the Wrinkle in Time cover and some Dell covers Richard Bober had done in the 70s for a number of Alfred Hitchcock books, including one for Stories Not for the Nervous, which uses a lot of the same shades of blues and greens as the Wrinkle cover. And all the way to the right, there's a green, alien-like figure with a feature that instantly stood out to Adam and me.

• 33:24Speaker 05

  Red eyes on that one.

• 33:26Amory Sivertson?

  The red eyes.

• 33:27Speaker 05

  That one guy.

• 33:28Amory Sivertson?

  You know what else is the kind of... On that same character that has red eyes in both of these, the head has a... Has like... I don't know what else to put this, but like, the head kind of has a butt crack.

• 33:42Speaker 05

  Oh, sure.

• 33:43Amory Sivertson?

  Do you know what I mean? Where the heads both have a like, like a center part, but no hair.

• 33:49Speaker 05

  That is a really interesting feature for them to both share.

• 33:53Amory Sivertson?

  My artistic eye, not so bad after all, huh, Ben?

• 33:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  You can spot butt crack heads a mile away.

• 34:01Speaker 05

  It really looks like what you'd expect to see from an illustrator who's doing a bunch of horror influenced covers, has sort of a set of ideas and tools that they're returning to. Did Jane or Jill...

• 34:16Amory Sivertson?

  Bober's agents, present and past.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  Give you more information other than just saying it was not Bober?

• 34:23Amory Sivertson?

  It's definitely not Bober, verified. With Jill Baumann. No, that's all that she said.

• 34:30Speaker 05

  Why do they both seem confident about that?

• 34:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  That is an excellent question.

• 34:37Amory Sivertson?

  I agree, although I was a little nervous to reach back out to Jane and Jill to basically question their judgment. But with a little Adam Angel on my shoulder...

• 34:46Speaker 05

  Keep pulling the Richard Buber thread. That's my recommendation.

• 34:50Amory Sivertson?

  I sent them both an email with the subject line, "Are you sure it's not Buber?" Two days later, I got a response. And then, a call. "Hi Jane, can you hear me okay?"

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yes, I can.

• 35:03Amory Sivertson?

  Jane Frank, Buber's agent and manager of his artistic estate, had big news for me. Or at least, big if true. Her email had read, in all caps, "I can confirm it is the work of Richard Buber."

• 35:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, man, Jane.

• 35:23Amory Sivertson?

  It turns out, not only was she not sure the Wrinkle Artist wasn't Buber, she had apparently already started considering the possibility that it was.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  I'm sort of like you, in a way. I'm a sleuth.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Okay, and so I said, "Wait a minute, um, why not go back to the source?"

• 35:43Amory Sivertson?

  Now, again, Richard Buber died last December, but his brother Leon is still alive. And Leon's two sons, Leon Buber III and Matthew Buber, are apparently pretty familiar with their uncle's work. Leon III especially.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Every single thing his uncle has ever done. Who knew?

• 36:01Amory Sivertson?

  So, Richard Buber's family supposedly knew the 1976 Dell paperback cover of A Wrinkle in Time was his work. But, they didn't say how they know. And that, I told Jane, wasn't gonna cut it for this sleuth.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  I'm on your side. I'm just as curious as you are.

• 36:20Speaker 05

  I think it was like, you know, the first book that I had read that he did the cover to. So, I remember like, having it in school and talking about how it handled the cover.

• 36:30Amory Sivertson?

  This is Matthew Buber, one of Richard Buber's nephews. And Matthew says he's seen this painting with his own two eyes at his Uncle Richard's house.

• 36:41Speaker 05

  He had a pool table in the basement, and we would always be down there playing. And all around the pool table leaning against the wall were paintings.

• 36:49Amory Sivertson?

  The Wrinkle in Time cover was painted on Masonite, Matthew says. It's like a thick, super compressed cardboard.

• 36:56Speaker 05

  Maybe 15 by 22 or 23 or whatever, somewhere around there. Just kind of a normal illustration size.

• 37:02Amory Sivertson?

  Matthew thinks the first time he saw the Wrinkle painting in his uncle's basement in Pennsylvania was when he was about 10 or 11 years old. So in the late 80s, which means, Ben, that Dell did return the original painting to Richard Bober. It wasn't burned or destroyed, at least not by the publisher.

• 37:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Uh oh.

• 37:23Amory Sivertson?

  And not on purpose.

• 37:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  Uh oh.

• 37:26Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, in case the whole paintings leaning against the basement wall bit hadn't already tipped you off.

• 37:32Speaker 05

  My uncle was not the best archive keeper.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Of the work that was in his possession, 15% was destroyed by his cats and a moldy basement filled with water.

• 37:44Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, no.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. A lot was destroyed that way, and 5% is gone totally. I have no idea where it is. Wrinkle in Time is one of those.

• 37:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  15% of everything is destroyed by cats, Amory. That's a law of the universe.

• 38:03Amory Sivertson?

  And at least I'd say 17% is destroyed by rabbits.

• 38:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  More rabbits than cats? Wow.

• 38:12Amory Sivertson?

  I don't know. She's going through a destructive phase right now, but.

• 38:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  Shots fired at Amory's bunny jewel.

• 38:17Amory Sivertson?

  She's great. Anyway, Matthew and the rest of the Bober family don't know where the Wrinkle painting is either anymore. The last time Matthew saw the painting, it was in an even smaller form than the paperback cover. It was a four by five inch slide.

• 38:33Speaker 05

  I would call it an informal archiving, you know, taking the painting outside and. With a 35 millimeter in slide film and shooting it. That's what he would do. Boxes the slides.

• 38:44Amory Sivertson?

  At some point, the nephews helped Richard digitize those slides by basically just taking a digital photo of each one. A picture of a picture. So when I asked the Bobers initially if they had any proof that Richard had done the wrinkle painting, Matthew's dad sent me this.

• 39:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hmm. So I see like four paintings or several paintings here and they're very cool. Like there's like a shark swallowing a person and the person's feet are sticking out. There's a painting of two hands holding up a television with a super creepy image on it. And there's the painting. There it is in all its glory. And it totally fits, like it totally fits stylistically with the others. Like this is clearly the work of one person and one really talented, kind of like spooky artist. It's really cool.

• 39:39Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, it's really cool. And getting the pictures of these slides, that to me was like, yes. You know, like this is it. This is, this is in his collection of all of his works, his digitized works. And, you know, I asked Matthew what he thinks his uncle would make of all of this if he were alive. You know, thousands of people on the internet wanting an answer, weighing in with their theories, having their own paperback version of Richard's work without knowing it. Dozens of artists and publishing industry professionals connecting for the first time in years over this mystery. And, you know, a professional pain in the ass in Boston, talking to his nephew about

• 40:21Amory Sivertson?

  this long-lost, uncredited, iconic piece of nightmare fuel.

• 40:27Speaker 05

  He would probably find it funny. He probably wouldn't have talked to you, but he would have let it be known that it was his painting because it definitely was, you know, he knew the value of what he did and it wasn't.

• 40:39Speaker 06

  Wasn't humble about that. So he definitely would be like, yeah, that's my painting.

• 40:50Amory Sivertson?

  There's obviously a sadness to the fact that Richard doesn't get to see this long overdue credit be given to his work. But if he were alive today, his agent Jane Frank told me that left to his own devices, he never would have known about this online quest for an answer.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  He had no cellphone, no computer. He had no long distance service. The only way I could contact him was to call him. He couldn't call me.

• 41:16Amory Sivertson?

  A recluse, Jane calls him. In nearly 30 years of representing him, she only met him once.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  I was accepting awards for him at various conventions and saying that he was not a figment of my imagination. No one in the field had ever met him.

• 41:33Amory Sivertson?

  But you know who spent a lot of time with Richard Bober? His nephew, Matthew, who's an artist himself now, not of book covers. He does these hyper realistic, sort of eerie still life paintings that you would swear are photographs, but they're not. And even though Matthew's style is different from Richard's, you can hear the impact his uncle had on him, even from a young age.

• 41:56Speaker 06

  He would always let me sit there and watch him paint. So many, many, many, many nights I got to sit there and just watch him work on a cover or whatever he was working on. So learned incredible a lot from that to see what the profession, what it meant to be a professional, you know, and just watch that. It's, I can't even describe what that meant to me.

• 42:21Amory Sivertson?

  Like any artist, Richard Bober's style and subjects evolved over time as he shifted from dread inducing sci fi and horror commercial work to more personal, romantic, fantastical. It's honestly hard to say.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  His work was memorable for being so anachronistic at a time when.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Most artists were working to be as slick as they could be. He was like a throwback. He could play on people's emotions and their emotional reaction to art.

• 42:57Amory Sivertson?

  But it makes sense why someone like Jane, who became more acquainted with Bober's work in the second half of his career, would initially rule him out for the Wrinkle in Time cover. And why someone like Bruce Hall, the art director who really only knew Bober as a sci fi artist, would be so certain that the Wrinkle cover was done by him.

• 43:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  So we got to go back to Sarah Elizabeth, right? Our blogger and author and mystery giver. What does she think?

• 43:23Speaker 06

  Freaking incredible. When I first wrote that blog post, it's because I had given up. I knew there was someone out there who knew someone, but I just didn't know if it would get to their eyeballs.

• 43:38Amory Sivertson?

  The ironic thing, Ben, is that Sarah actually was familiar with Richard Bober before this. Really just with one piece of his.

• 43:45Speaker 06

  I never would have connected it to the eerie lurid cover that we're talking about. The art that I had seen is the most beautiful vampire lady painting I have ever seen in my life. She looks like a vampire mean girl, and I love her so much. So when I found out that Richard Bober was the artist, I was so thrilled because I'm like, yes, I do know this guy.

• 44:15Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, it is. It's almost like parts of yourself that have come together. Your love for this cover and your love for that vampire lady. Now they get to come together because it's the same artist.

• 44:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Sarah's new book, The Art of Fantasy, comes out in a couple of weeks, which means she obviously couldn't include Richard Bober's A Wrinkle in Time illustration.

• 44:41Speaker 06

  So it kills me, but the book's already printed.

• 44:45Amory Sivertson?

  You know what? Second edition of The Art of Fantasy.

• 44:49Speaker 06

  That's very true.

• 44:51Amory Sivertson?

  And if Sarah's book does get a second edition, there's a chance, albeit a small one, that she'll be able to use the Richard Bober Wrinkle in Time original, like, the original original.

• 45:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  We got more than a slide?

• 45:06Amory Sivertson?

  We don't know, yet, but Matthew Bober and his family are in the process of cleaning out Richard's house. And the wrinkle painting may very well be lost to the cats and the basement flooding, but it also might not be.

• 45:22Amory Sivertson?

  I'm saying a little prayer that that painting is in your uncle's basement and that you're going to find it. If it pops up, I will definitely let you know.

• 45:47Amory Sivertson?

  In the meantime, if you are one of the many, many people who commented, tweeted, or told me firsthand that this 1976 paperback edition of A Wrinkle in Time is the one you have on your bookshelf, do me a favor, right now. Get your copy, grab a pen, go to the inside cover or the copyright page and write, "Illustration by Richard Bober."

• 46:15Amory Sivertson?

  Let's make sure that Bober's work isn't a mystery anymore.

• 46:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hell, yeah.

• 46:34Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by me, Amory Sivertson, and co-hosted by me and...

• 46:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team includes Quincy Walters, Grace Tatter, Dean Russell, Matt Reed, Paul Vikes, and Sumit Joshi.

• 46:54Amory Sivertson?

  This episode is dedicated to Sarah Elizabeth's dad, who was an artist himself and who died unexpectedly between when she brought the mystery to us and when it got solved.

• 47:06Speaker 06

  This would have been like the first thing I would have filled him in on. Not, hey dad, I've written three books or whatever. I would tell him about this.

• 47:24Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the very clear line between unsolved mysteries and solved ones. And truly, I cannot thank Sarah Elizabeth enough for bringing this mystery to us and really so many people for responding to my emails, answering my calls, joining me on this mission. The list is long, like 70 plus people, seriously. And you can see it in full at wbur.org/endlessthread. But I can't go without shouting out a few folks in particular who really stuck with me, including Matthew Bober and the Bober family, Bruce Hall, Secret Weapon Judy Gittenstein, Jane Frank, Adam Rowe, Mike Jackson and Michael Whalen, Tim Komen, Fred Taraba, Vina Williams

• 48:08Amory Sivertson?

  at Smith College, Chris Heim from Books of Wonder, and Natella Time on Reddit, who put us on Sarah Elizabeth's radar in the first place.

• 48:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  All of which is a great reminder that if you too have an unsolved mystery, an untold history, or some other wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. [email protected].

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context. Why you're excited about it? Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities. For example, speakers of different languages. There are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 50:13Speaker 06

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 50:43Speaker 06

  Ugh, I hate Mondays. King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite? Uh, Taylor Hanson? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 50:52Speaker 06

  Hey, let's get back to work, please. But Taylor Hanson's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. Taylor Hanson? Nice.

• 51:00Speaker 07

  Try one. Mmm.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. There's nothing like it.