Postcrossing Blog

Joel Anderson is an illustrator, designer, and founding owner of Anderson Design Group (ADG). Their 63 National Parks, Coastal Collection, and Legends sets of postcards have captured postcrossers’ imaginations and are a favorite of many.

Joel took some time out from his busy Nashville studio to answer Clarisse (aka Cstar9)'s questions via email. All the art included in this post is the work of the Anderson Design Group.

In exploring your work online, I keep running into several keywords that describe the Anderson Design Group – nostalgia, golden age, wonder, adventure, local pride. Do these resonate? Are there other descriptors you’d use?

These are very good words to describe our style of art. As a student in the 1980s at Ringling School of Art & Design, I was particularly drawn to Golden Age illustrators who created magazine covers, ads, and poster art in the early 20th century, before photography became more widely used. These artists hand-lettered, drew, and painted everything in a romantic, iconic style that glamorized travel, celebrated beauty, and evoked a longing to explore.

The travel poster art of that era was commissioned by railways, cruise lines, automobile makers, and eventually airlines to entice people to buy tickets and go places.

Artwork from that magical era still conjures up a feeling of wonder, awe, and passion. We strive to capture some of that magic in our artwork. Our goal is to pick up where these 20th-century masters left off and continue their legacy for a whole new generation to enjoy.

Tell us about the artists in your design group.

Anderson Design Group is an ever-evolving team of artists who have worked under my direction for 30 years. I was trained to be an illustrator and a graphic designer, so I still enjoy doing some of the artwork myself.

4+ years ago, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, so I am gradually losing my fine motor skills. This has challenged me to enhance my skills as an Art Director—sort of like a composer/director of a chamber orchestra. I don’t have to play all of the instruments, I just have to have a vision, the skills to communicate it, and virtuoso players to interpret the vision, adding their own talent, experience, style, and skill along the way.

I have 2 in-house artists (Aaron Johnson and Derek Anderson) who work closely with me, day in and day out. I also have a roster of contract artists who I engage because of their particular style or skill. One of my collaborating artists lives in Spain, another in New York.

Others I’ve worked with live in Colorado, Georgia, Seattle, and South Carolina. You can see all of the artist’s names next to each of the 2,500+ designs on our site.

The common thread that ties our diverse styles together is attention to authentic detail and a love for Golden Age-styled artwork. I push my artists to create artwork using techniques, rendering styles, colors, and type styling that was popular from 1900 to 1960. We use computers and modern tools, but I encourage my artists to study art history—especially early 20th-century commercial art—and to emulate the sense of style, passion, and grace of that era.

Every year you donate a portion of your profits to the National Park Foundation. ADG has several collections devoted to parks, and you write frequently about individual parks in your blog. At what point did national parks become a focus for the Anderson Design Group?

Our first series of poster/postcard art was created in 2004 to celebrate our hometown, Nashville, Tennessee. It was the Spirit of Nashville Collection, and it featured our favorite things about Music City. That first series of prints won a bunch of awards and began to establish our reputation for doing poster art about specific destinations.

After we had done 150 posters about Nashville, folks from other American cities asked us if we would celebrate their town in the same classic style. So we did posters depicting major U.S. cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans, Las Vegas, etc. That spawned our Art & Soul of America series.

As we thought about our favorite American destinations, National Parks ranked high on the list, so we began celebrating several of the National Parks and National Monuments in our classic style.

In 2015, my wife and our 4 kids borrowed an old RV and drove from Tennessee to Utah and Arizona to visit the Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Petrified Forest. That trip was life-changing for our family. It lit the flame for our National Parks passion, and it inspired me to begin trying to render one poster for each of the 59 parks.

My son Nathan is a writer. He and I had an idea—what if we took all of the poster art and we published a book to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the National Parks Service? (The Centennial would be in 2016.) So we published the book (59 Illustrated National Parks) and it became a best-seller.

We’ve since printed multiple editions of the book, updating each time Congress adds new parks. (Now there are 63 National Parks.) We continue to visit as many National Parks each year as possible. We love hiking, taking photos, and just basking in the wilderness and wonder of our American heritage. The parks belong to all of us, and they are definitely worth celebrating, protecting, and passing along to the next generation.

I’m personally dying to know the origins of the Legends series, which are my favorite of your cards. What is this collection’s story?

After we had depicted all 63 of the National Parks in many different ways, we began doing research to figure out other interesting aspects of the parks that we had not yet celebrated in our artwork. We had a lot of success with our Bigfoot posters, and we soon began to notice that many of the parks were associated with similar myths, legends, and historical indigenous stories about Sasquatch and other more bizarre cryptids. As we did our research, we came across legends like the Moth Man, Lizard Man, Grass Man, the Jackelope, the Wendigo, and other creepy, unexplained, or quirky tall tales.

This was an artist’s dream, since nobody had ever photographed or videotaped one of these mythical creatures (except for Bigfoot?). All we had to do was piece together the various stories and use our imaginations to fill in the blanks. We found at least 38 different National Parks with significant legends. During our research, we became aware of other mythical creatures from around the world like the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, etc. These international creatures are featured in our poster art, but not yet in our postcard sets.

Tell us about your studio [which I hope to tour soon!] – what are some of the inspirational elements there?

I like toys. I like collecting quirky objects (my wife calls them junk). And I like making folk art out of found objects. This creative clutter (pictured here) brightens our studio and adds some whimsy to our decor scheme.

You’ve had quite a career. What have been some of the most courageous pivots you have made, and what were the biggest lessons you learned from those?

I am 58 years old now. I started ADG 30 years ago. Back then, we were doing mostly album cover and book cover design work for clients like Universal, Capitol Records, Random House, Harper Collins, etc. That was fun, but my passion was illustration—especially poster art. For the first 10 years, only 10% of our business was illustration, and very little of it was poster-related. Today, our biz is 90% illustration, and of that work, most of it is poster art.

We made the shift by saying NO to good-paying jobs that did not fit our passion, and saying YES to jobs that let us do what we loved most. Our work and reputation just kept improving as we focused more and more on what we loved to do. We diversified from doing mostly work for clients to doing a combination of client work, retail, wholesale, and licensing. We opened a retail space in our building, we built a good online store, and I began licensing our art to companies who use it on calendars, puzzles, fabric, and souvenirs. Mind you, we’re still a small, family-owned biz run by just me, my wife, and our son Nathan. We only have 4 employees besides the 3 family members.

Covid was bad for our retail store (it is no longer open), but it was great for our online store. So the big lesson is that life never goes as planned. Challenges can end up being good, even if they cause headaches at first. I believe The Almighty has a plan for each of us, and hence, a good reason for everything that happens in life. I believe that adversity builds character, faith, ingenuity, and humility—all necessary ingredients in living a purpose-driven, joy-filled life! I’ve had to pivot due to Parkinson’s, too… I am now art directing most of the time and not illustrating as much as before (unless I am going for a squiggly, shaky rendering style)!

What is your relationship to paper broadly, and specifically to postal mail (including postcards)?

I love paper. Poster paper, postcard stock, drawing paper, books—they all inspire me. Computer screens, tablets, and phones lack the warmth, permanence, and heirloom quality of paper products. I still send cards, letters, and postcards. I decorate with framed prints. I love opening the mailbox and pulling out a genuine hand-addressed card or envelope. Who doesn’t?

Who would you say have been your main influencers in design?

Many of the nameless artists of the Works Progress Administration era have greatly influenced my art. Norman Rockwell, NC Wyeth, Kustav Klimt, Roger Broders, Alphonse Mucha, Ludwig Hohlwein, and Tom Purvis are some of my heroes, too. Everything my team creates is inspired in some way by artists who have gone before us. We often mentor art students and give them tours of our studio. Our work is inspiring hundreds of young artists who will eventually follow in our footsteps creating a whole new generation of art. Nothing is new under the sun, yet each new creation nudges art history forward.

What’s something you are most proud of, in your art/design work?

I am very satisfied to know that thousands of people around the world enjoy looking at a poster or postcard designed by Anderson Design Group. I am proud of my artists, my family, and our collaborators who all work together to make accessible, affordable, enjoyable art. And I am so blessed to be able to enjoy the fruits of my labor while I am still alive (unlike so many brilliant struggling artists whose work only became famous or profitable after they died).

What’s next for Anderson Design Group?

We are finishing off our World Travel Collection—a massive poster series that includes at least one poster for every country on the globe. It would make a fabulous 200-piece postcard set, but it would probably cost about $100… so I’m not sure if people would buy it! Maybe we could break it up into smaller collector sets—divided up by continents? But wait—Antarctica would be a pretty small set!

To learn more about Joel and the Anderson Design Group work, check out their website and shop. You can also see this video interview on Joel Anderson’s origins and growth as an artist and business founder, including how to approach failure! And last but not least, you can learn how Anderson Design Group’s Spirit of Nashville series became iconic in Nashville.

And now, for the traditional giveaway you’ve all been waiting for! Clarisse is going to send 4 postcards from the Anderson Design group to 4 randomly picked postcrossers. To participate, leave a comment below sharing your favorite national park from your country. Four winners will be picked and posted here next week.

Jackie Morris is an artist and writer based in Wales. Her Wild Cards postcard set, a collaboration with writer Robert Macfarlane, is grounded in their best-selling book series, The Lost Spells and The Lost Words.

Jackie graciously paused between creations for a conversation with Clarisse (aka Cstar9) about her recent book projects, her lifetime love of postcards, and the importance of painting as if you have paws.

All the art pieces in this story are copyright Jackie Morris, used with her permission!

You’ve described your work with Robert Macfarlane as a kind of alchemy. How did your collaboration begin?

We were both co-signers of a 2015 letter to the Oxford Junior Dictionary to request that they reinstate nature words, like 'acorn’, that were dropped from the new edition to make way for words like 'broadband’.

Here in the UK, we’ve got 70% of the world’s bluebell population, but they had dropped the word 'bluebell’ from the dictionary.

This sat in my head for a while. And then I wrote to Rob, whom I did not know, to say, this would make a beautiful book, all these words: like a tiny dictionary of forgotten things. I asked him if he’d want to write an introduction for such a book. And he said, thank you very much, but I’m really busy. And then about two weeks later he came back and said, this is really haunting me. Perhaps we could collaborate?

So, that’s where The Lost Words started, and it did become a real collaboration of words and images working together.

It’s become more than a book – it’s theatre, it’s wallpaper on hospital walls, it’s music, it’s postcards [learn more here about the art exhibits, albums, touring musical, and curriculum guides for schools].

But, you know, I had to beg for this postcard set, The Wild Cards. I wanted them straightaway, because I love postcards, and also I think every card advertises the book. But the publishers were worried that people would buy the cards and not the book. However, it seems people are buying both.

I’m hoping we can get a postcard box for our next book, as well.

You’ve said your past artwork feels almost like it was an apprenticeship for The Lost Words. Can you say more about that?

I’ve worked a lot. I’ve made enough money to live on. I’ve followed my own path and learned my craft. I think I was lucky not to have had this level of success too early. With this project, I’ve been able to turn my craft to the attention of really local things. The dandelion in the book was a footstep outside my front door. You can’t get much more local than that. Being able to turn your craft into something so close to your own soul is amazing.

What do you hope to convey with the project?

I didn’t realize until the first book was published that it was actually a howl of outrage against those who would destroy these wild things. Some people march on the streets, others do what they can in their own way. I try to be as positive as possible in my ways of protest. Every stroke of my brush is prayer and protest tangled up together.

You’ve said you have to inhabit a thing – almost shapeshift – in order to draw or paint it.

It’s a difficult thing to explain, but you need to be inside a butterfly’s wing – or try and feel like you have paws – in order to paint – in order to drop every illusion that you have of knowing what something looks like. It’s almost like acting your way through paint.

And when you’re there, you know when you’re getting it right, and when you’re not there, you know you’re flogging a dead horse.

One of the things I’ve learned in painting is that you have to be willing to make mistakes. That’s how you get to the bit where something is as right as it can be. And it’s never right, you know. Everything’s always a bit off. I used to be so disappointed with all my finished work. And then I learned it’s not the finished thing that interests me. It’s the process of getting to the point where I can stop.

I’m not saying I don’t value my work, because obviously that’s how I make my living. But now I know it’s the process of sitting on the hill, of growing wings and getting into a raven’s head – that’s the joy.

You invoke a lot of gesture and movement in the wild moments you paint. Can you talk about how you decide, say, what a fox will be doing in your painting?

I try to catch some of the fluidity of their movement. Whenever I’m painting anything, I’m soul-hunting, in a way.

I draw from life, and I use photographs, and I’ve got loads of teachers all around me in the studio.

I don’t know whether you can see these owls behind me [you can see them in a photo below]. This is a European barn owl. And this is a tawny owl. I’ve got a kingfisher over there. And there’s a fox.

I’ve got all these taxidermied things that I draw from. It’s a weird kind of animal rescue, when something is already dead. But I try to put life back into them with my paintings.

This sketchbook drawing is from the bird book.

Tell us about the bird book.

It’s our third book. It’s huge. I’m only just over halfway through; there’s a lot of work still to do. I’m painting each species that we’ve chosen, and Rob is writing an exquisite, 50,000-word prose poem.

There are so many books about birds, you know. Why do we need another one? Perhaps to prevent a greater thinning in the tapestry of life, as the sky becomes quieter and more empty of flying things.

Within arm’s reach in my studio, I have things like this blackbird nest. These eggs are replicas, of course—the real thing has a different sheen to it.

It fascinates me how this tiny little porcelain casket full of liquid turns into feather and song and flight. And that’s what we’re trying to really celebrate – that utter wonder and creativity.

When I meet somebody who is so diametrically opposed to this thought—who sees nature as dirty, who sees other lives as lesser, I hold to my heart a phrase from Richard Powers, who wrote the book Overstory. He wrote that no amount of argument can change a person’s mind. Only a good story can.

A lot of things give me hope every day. Including this Postcrossing thing. What an amazing thing – when our governments try to divide us, we still just have such a simple way of reaching out to a stranger and going, Hi!

I just signed up for Postcrossing and sent out my first three cards. And the first person for me to send a card to, she’s in America, and she’s an artist, and it’s like, how did that happen? It’s just amazing.

Let’s talk about postcards! What’s your first memory of postal mail?

Getting mail is so exciting! When I was really little, I used to love getting postcards from people when they went on holiday. When I went to places, I loved choosing a card and then posting it.

My studio has postcards stuck to the ceiling. I’ve got postcards that I had in college 40 years ago.

I bought an album of old postcards recently, and I’ve been taking them out and sending them to people. I love making original ones, as well.

One of the highlights of my career was being sent a book by Wendell Berry’s publicist, which I loved so much that I painted and posted a postcard to thank her. When she received it, she asked if she could use my words as a quote on the front of the book. Now, I don’t do endorsements for books, but I said, Are you kidding me? That’s great.

I love postcard stories. I wrote a post on my own blog a couple of years ago, asking people to write a comment about postcards in their lives – how far is the furthest one you’ve received, what’s the oldest postcard you’ve still got? And their responses were simply amazing.

What’s next for you?

I’m not getting many chances to write at the moment. But I’ve got things that I want to write. I feel myself slipping out of time because I’m over 60 now. I have less time ahead of me than I have behind. All the hours that other people spend watching game shows on TV—I want that time. I’d be an hour vampire if I could. I love sleeping, but you know, there are just things that I want to create.

A recent project of mine is called The Silent Unwinding. The book’s postcard set was released in autumn 2023.

I’ll show you another project – can you see all the hares over there? They’re waiting to be in a book. One or two more hares have to join them before they’re done.

The boxes they’re standing on are antique boxes of paints that are about 200 years old. I wake the paints up with some water and use them. They behave very differently than newer paints, and you have to remember not to suck the brush because they’re full of toxins. They’re from the early days, when artists didn’t have to make their own watercolors: proper chemistry and alchemy combined with science. And geography as well. Because of where all the colors come from.

The older I get, the more excited I get to see things. This afternoon, I’m going to the place where the skylarks sing.

We are lucky. We are lucky because we were raised to notice the way a dandelion folds up and then unfolds into something so completely other. How a caterpillar goes into a cocoon and then becomes a butterfly. What interests me is how these stories travel through time, in all of us. Every day we’re making new stories for the future.

To learn more about Jackie and her work, check out her website, Instagram and blog. You can also read a book review of The Unwinding, and watch Jackie paint a snow leopard or give a tour of her studio (so many postcards! 😍).

And here’s the cheeky giveaway you’ve all been waiting for! Clarisse is going to send 4 postcards from the The Wild Cards set to 4 randomly picked postcrossers. To participate, leave a comment below to share your old favorite word that people seem to have forgotten. Don’t forget to come back this time next week to check out the winners!

Rose Wong is a New York-based illustrator whose work can be found in the popular Flower Box set, and in the pages of The New York Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and more.

Last year, Clarisse (aka CStar9) caught up with Rose via web-cast in her Brooklyn studio. All the art pictured in this interview is Rose’s work!

When did you first identify as a visual artist? You’ve said that as a child, you used to make intricate drawings in Microsoft Paint.

I’ve always been a visual artist. It was something I just liked doing. No one prompted me to do it. I really wish I had the forethought of saving all those MS Paint drawings I made back then, but it was a different time.

Deciding to go to school for visual art was a more serious step. I didn’t even know what illustration was. Drawing, right? Fine art drawing? But then I did research and saw it was more along the lines of what I thought I wanted to do.

That was a huge leap of faith for me, and for my parents who were funding me through school. My parents immigrated from China before I was born. I’m the oldest child, and they hadn’t really gone to college, so I was the first. I had cousins who had done the STEM career thing, and my parents just said, “You shouldn’t do that. You should do what you’re best at. Yeah, you should do art.”

When I graduated, I did a couple of editorials here and there — commercial jobs like book covers. But I was still very much in the student zone, figuring out my style and getting a footing in what it meant to work for clients.

I think I really became a visual artist when I started working full-time in 2018. I had been laid off from my job. And I was worried, because I didn’t ever make the decision to go freelance. I just started doing it. About a year later, when I started getting consistent jobs, I thought, oh, wait, I’m professionally a visual artist now.

The New York Times was my first client. They’ve been my repeat client ever since.

The 10 postcards in the Flower Box that represent you are “Blue No. 1” through “Blue No. 10”. Can you tell us about the roots of these cards?

Initially the drawings were black and white. But they said another artist in the box was already doing black and white, and they thought two black and white sets would be confusing. So I was like, you know what, I do sometimes draw in blue, so I digitally changed it — my inspiration being Chinese porcelain.

That was in 2017, before I did as much digital work. I was drawing from life. I used to go to the Botanic Garden to draw, after days at my full-time job. That was my oasis.

We can see some plants in one of my recent sketchbooks: these are drawn with gel pen on Moleskine.

Is that sketchbook gridded? How on earth do you make such straight lines?

Sometimes you find materials that are just right for you. Grids have informed my drawing a lot. It also just makes my brain feel good to draw straight lines and to fill in in black. I use a ruler now, but all my plant stuff in 2017 was pre-ruler, just using the grid. It was all very neat. That’s what I think adds to the “design”-ness of my work. It’s not just free-form.

This is my most recent still-life. You can see it’s a return to less linear.

What do you think is responsible for that shift?

In my craft, even for editorial, I always start off drawing. I let myself be really scribbly with pencil and paper. When you move to Illustrator, everything gets straighter and tighter. So, working from analog paper to digital — the digital has now affected how I do the analog.

In my early editorials, I was trying to imitate the tight aesthetic of digital, and it was really difficult. Illustrator has taught me how to create shapes. It’s so funny to say that, but shapes didn’t come as naturally to me when I was drawing freely. I was just drawing what I was seeing. But then I started to see the flowers and plants I was drawing as squares, circles, ovals.

Of course lately there’s a desire to go back to natural, because I feel like maybe I’m too stiff now when I draw. I’m rulering everything and making it too perfect. So, analog and digital really affect each other for me. The two are in conversation, constantly.

How do you go from observing something to creating art on the page?

I graduated from Pratt Institute in 2014, and I got my first job working at Fishs Eddy, which is a kitchenware store. I was the assistant to the product designer and visual merchandising designer, so I was working both upstairs and downstairs of the store. I had learned Illustrator in school but had never applied it. So, during this time I was turning a lot of traditional drawings into vectors in Illustrator, to be printed onto ceramic ware. I was doing that for hours — just, like, tracing a floral design — as my job. And I got really good at Illustrator, and at the pen tool!

But also at that time, I was doing a lot of location drawings with my partner and some friends who had a plein air club. I was starting to develop a style by looking closely and trying to simplify what I was seeing. Now I do image research by spending a lot of time with books, bookstores, and museums. My partner, who is a book designer, is really good about this. Before, I would just look at one thing and then try to create something. Now I’m trying to be more intentional. When I was doing my most recent zine, I had six books laid out on the floor. As much as I love my folder of Instagram saves, it’s so nice to have books around, so I’m not searching through my computer for my inspirations. I have them all together in one place that’s real.

What’s your relationship to snail mail, or to paper and stationery in general?

It’s so funny, because I love receiving stationery. I love collecting postcards. I love the images. But I don’t write many letters. I save all the wonderful postcards and little notes sent by my friends who love letter writing and care packages. I am terrible at making time to write little notes, but it might one day click for me.

Can you tell us about your Lookbook project?

Lookbook was born during COVID. I got burnt out doing a lot of COVID drawings for client work. I felt like I had no attention span to make art for myself anymore. So, for Lookbook, I gave myself like a set of parameters. I wanted a project that was basically about repeating something small and eventually amassing something bigger. I was already doing these little girl drawings and fashion drawings and repeating them in my sketchbook.

So, here you see basically the origins of Lookbook.

Then I moved to doing these in Illustrator, which was a lot quicker than drawing them. I would do them in batches of 7 to 10 and post one a day. It was a way for me to quickly create little moments of art: inspiration about this color green, or this shape I saw in real life, or a vegetable I saw that I thought was really nice. I’d try to treat my Lookbooks as if I was drawing in my sketchbook, trying not to delete anything and just keep building. And being like, okay, I’m not going to fuss over them — I’ll just move on to the next one if I have a better idea.

This is not a question but a comment: Please tell your agent that Lookbook should be packaged as a set of postcards.

I’ve had people say, you should make stickers out of this. But I’m holding out for the book first! It’d be so cool for a digital project to come back around to analog, as a book, like we were talking about before. I should reach out to book agents, but that involves all this bureaucratic stuff that artists don’t like to think about when they are making things.

What’s something you’re proud of, outside of your drawing?

I’m really proud of my ceramics. When I got laid off in 2018, my friend and I decided to take a ceramics class that we’d already been wanting to do. It was a two-month class. And I said, that’s a great idea — I need structure. I did it as a “treat myself” sort of thing. But then I just fell in love and never stopped! It has woven seamlessly into my life and changed it in ways I never could have imagined.

For me it’s a respite from digital. My ceramics are also different from my illustration because they’re very decorative. I’m finding more ways to simplify patterns within my own language. I’m building my world through actual objects, which is so different than doing it on paper.

So yeah, I’m really proud of that. I also think it kind of links to the idea of postcards, because postcards obviously have a function, but they’re very decorative. The function is what gets it out into the world, but the decoration is why you want to send it. At the end of day, a ceramic piece holds water, plants, or pencils, and but it can also be just simply pretty.

What’s a new project you’re excited about? Or something you’re working towards?

Well, I recently just finished my new zine for the Brooklyn Art Book Fair. I do riso printing with my friends from school in a project called TXTbooks. Zines and bookmaking allow me the space to explore something that I’m interested in, in a longer format, which in this case is architecture and imagined spaces.

In my zines there are no words — it’s really a free-form experience — a non-linear narrative. I want it to be an immersive journey. I love feeling like I’m capturing moments in my work.

Otherwise, I am excited to do more ceramics stuff. And I’ve been making a little foray into furniture and other bigger pieces. I’m just really excited to do… everything!

To learn more about Rose, check out her website and Instagram pages! You can also read about her roots as a digital artist, or about fashion and creativity in her recent Lookbook project.

And now, for the traditional giveaway, Clarisse is going to send 4 postcards from the Flower Box set to 4 randomly picked postcrossers. To participate, leave a comment below to share your favorite illustrator that should have a postcard box made with their art (but hasn’t yet)! Come back this time next week to check out the winners!

Bob Eckstein is an award-winning writer, New Yorker cartoonist, and author/illustrator of The New York Times best-selling book (and postcard box set!), Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores.

Last summer, in a webcast interview from his New York-based studio, Bob shared with Clarisse (aka CStar9) his love for endangered bookstores, admitted he used to send toast through the mail, and urged creative people not to work alone.

For your World’s Greatest Bokstores project, why bookstores? And how did you narrow down your bookstore choices?

There were many different reasons why a store would be chosen: its historical significance, its importance to the community, maybe its beauty. Main-Street bookstores play so many important roles in a community, and I wanted to capture these in the book.

I have a great interest in story: people want to read something with meat on the bone. Luckily, bookstores are magical places. I profiled about 150 to 200 bookstores, and then had to choose half. I was hoping there would be a sequel!

You’ve written books about the bookstores of the world, but you’ve also written about snowmen, cats, Arctic explorers, and more. What does research look like for you?

Each of these books would have taken much longer without the internet. I make every attempt to visit and learn from a subject in person, but that is not logistically realistic, so sometimes research comes from surfing the web.

Once I find out everything I can, I try to simplify and curate the interesting stuff. That’s the glamorous part of writing a book. But eventually there comes a point where you have to stop doing that and just start writing.

You write for TV, you write prose, you paint, you are a cartoonist… Is there a medium that feels most like home for you?

It’s so much fun to create a cartoon that makes people laugh. And writing is something that I am certainly at home with.

I juggle many different things in my career. I’m a public speaker, I teach, I do cartoons for different magazines, I do illustration. It’s hard to make a living from this stuff. You have to produce a tremendous amount of work. At the moment, I’m working on four different books.

I write almost every single day. For the last few years, I’ve been waking up by 5:30 a.m. to start writing. By 9:00 a.m., I usually finish a piece. Then I can get started with the rest of my workday. That discipline is how I get so much done. I also don’t watch much TV!

You’ve said in an interview, “My deadlines are relentless [and I don’t doodle for fun]. If I’m drawing, it’s with a purpose.” Do you ever get creator’s block and if so, what do you do about it?

I have lists of ideas I don’t have time to get through.

I don’t get writer’s block, where I’m just sitting around for an idea or joke to fall into my lap. The way I teach others how to get out of ruts is this: usually it’s a matter of tuning in to the voices and ideas in your head. These days the world is a very loud place. We are all inundated with distractions and sensory overload. Taking a walk or just even taking a bath to be alone with your thoughts…it’s surprising how easy it can be to come up with ideas during those times.

You also can’t work alone. I believe the best gift a creative person can have is the ability to surround themselves with talented people.

Anything I’ve had success with can be traced back to someone who helped me: someone who gave me encouragement, who inspired me to explore something new, or who gave me a professional opportunity.

How do you narrow down your ideas?

There is so much rejection in this field. So, basically, I fold up as many paper airplanes as possible, and then I chuck them out of the window and see which ones stick.

I never actually intended to do postcards. But the opportunity came, and I went with it. I didn’t appreciate initially that the Bookstore postcards would go over so well. I always just cross my fingers that people will have a chance to see the things I work on. I know I usually sound like a have an ego the size of God’s cigar, but I was genuinely surprised to hear that for example, students were wallpapering their dorm rooms with the Bookstore postcards.

What’s your relationship to postal mail?

I love postcards. I have sent thousands of them – really! I used to send out mailings in groups of a thousand to potential art clients. I also sent jokes like poly-ethylening slices of toast and writing “Keep in toast” in yellow plastic that looked like squeeze-on butter. I eventually mailed them in plastic bags after sending hundreds with just putting a stamp on the piece of toast. Today I probably would be arrested.

I dearly miss the age of regularly corresponding with hand-written postcards. This year I sent maybe only a hundred. Email has ruined it, postage increases has ruined it, younger generations who don’t even write in script anymore has ruined it. I know I sound like an old man yelling from his porch, but it seems everything I love is going extinct -—from old-fashioned postcard correspondence to vinyl LPs, MAD magazine, and gag cartoons. I try to be a help. I raise awareness about the plight of disappearing bookstores. I’m writing a book now on our most important museums, and I’m working with a friend on a film that’s partly about climate change.

You do live drawing for events. How did that come about?

When I was a kid, I loved Sports Illustrated, and they would do drawings of sporting events. I eventually worked for them and was also a sports reporter of sorts for The Village Voice and The New York Times. So, it was natural for me to incorporate my humor and artwork to coverage.

I used to take-over the Times website front page for the Super Bowl, Olympics, or World Series. Then I did it for The New Yorker: the Oscars, Golden Globes, etc. I still live-draw occasionally to promote cultural events. It’s perfect for today when people want to see stuff as much as they want to read about it.

It’s also an example of how I like to always push the envelope, which artists and writers should always do. I’m always asking “what if?”.

It’s like the squirrel operetta I tried to make. What if?

What are you most proud of, outside of your writing and art?

It used to be my hair.

I’m very proud of my wife. She is a well-known book artist and a total bad-ass—she will hate this answer and I will pay for it later. But that’s what being a bad-ass is all about.

What advice would you give your 10-year-old self?

Growing up, there was no one who said, you’re funny, or, you should be a cartoonist. That didn’t happen until I was surrounded by friends very late in life.

My friend and mentor Sam Gross – who happened to be a cartoonist for the New Yorker – organized my birthday party one year. That party also happened to be the regular New Yorker staff lunch. The food was very good. I asked if I could come the following week and he said sure, but you also should make a cartoon and submit it to the magazine.

So I took up his dare, and the New Yorker ended up buying and publishing the first cartoon I drew. I realized later it wasn’t as easy as that. But it opened the door.

I always say to my students, you’re never going to have these things happen if you don’t show up. 80% of success is just showing up – being willing to listen to and learn from people. You never know when something life-changing is right there in front of you.

What’s next for you? And importantly: what postcards can we expect next?

This summer, I spoke at the Humor Writing Conference. A few times a month, I produce my Substack newsletter, The Bob, which has turned into a huge, pleasant surprise. I have a handful of magazine assignments to complete. As I said, I’m working on four books.

And I am looking to make a box set of postcards in 2025, of museums in the U.S.

We can’t just leave on that cliff-hanger! Tell us about the museums postcard project!

I covered 155 museums for this project. Like with the bookstores project, I visited as many of the museums as I could in person. But for those I couldn’t visit, I sent friends and other ambassadors to report back to me with their impressions and photographs.

When I went to a museum myself, first I would just go and experience the place holistically. But in the back of my mind, I was always thinking, what’s the best angle or the most unique view of this place that would create an incentive to people, to say, Oh, I’ve gotta add this place to my bucket list.

An example is the American Museum of Natural History, which has an iconic blue whale that hangs in the main room of the oceanic division. I felt like it would be delinquent on my part not to give people what they expect and want to see in a view of that place. And then I would make supplemental illustrations to pique additional interest. I hope people will feel a real sense of wonder when they’re exploring this project, whether they’re looking at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston or the SPAM Museum in Minnesota. It’s just mind-blowing that all these places exist.

I want to add that I’m still sad that the bookstore book ended. It was the same with the museums project. I did three illustrations a day. I put my heart and soul into this project and slept very little. But I didn’t mind the long hours because it was such a fun thing to do.

Editor’s note: Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums is about to be published — it’ll be out on May 14. Hopefully the corresponding set of postcards will soon follow! 😊

To learn more about Bob, check out his website and newsletter! Bob has given interviews about the long and winding road to becoming an author and cartoonist, about humor, about his book The Complete Book of Cat Names and also been interviewed for the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest podcast. For the aspiring writers out there, he has some tips on publishing and writing on Writer’s Digest.

And now, for the sneaky giveaway: Clarisse is going to send 4 postcards from Bob’s World’s Greatest Bookstores set to 4 randomly picked postcrossers! 🎉 To participate, leave a comment below to share your favorite bookshop. Come back this time next week to check out the winners!

Jeffrey Brown is a New York Times best-selling cartoonist based in Chicago. He’s written books for all ages, including the Star Wars Adventures book and postcard series that includes Darth Vader and Son, Vader’s Little Princess, and Rey and Pals. So it seemed only natural that we invite him for an interview.

Jeff was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to answer some questions from Clarisse (aka CStar9) via email.

Before we get started, what music should people listen to as they read this interview?

My first thought was the “Imperial March” from Star Wars, but I don’t think this interview will be quite so ominous and intimidating, so maybe I’ll say “Make a Picture” from the latest Andrew Bird album, Inside Problems.

Your process starts with a lot of brainstorming. For Rey and Pals, you began with almost 200 initial ideas! How do you know you’re ready to move on to step 2?

The ideas stage of any project is a 24/7 kind of thing. I bring my project brainstorming sketchbook with me everywhere and try to constantly be thinking of ideas and observing the world for anything that might click with a project.

I also dedicate a few hours a day just trying to come up with ideas, which includes reading and watching source material for inspiration.

I know I’m done when I really hit a wall, usually when I have a decent number of ideas – enough to see them making the cut for the final project. I give it a few days and if I don’t come up with more, then I’m ready for the next stage.

Of course, more ideas can still come all the way up until the final art is drawn.

Your work covers a tremendous range of content for all ages, including film. What are some of the elements that define your work across projects? In 5 words or less, what do you hope people take away?

In five words, I hope people take away: feeling and laughing is okay.

I think my work leans toward a slightly expressionist cartooning style. It’s definitely not realistic – I like to draw things that don’t line up quite the way they do in life.

I also always try to have heart and humor, so there’s a warmth, whether it’s autobiographical comics, Star Wars, or middle grade kids’ comics.

Tell us about your studio. What are some of the inspirational elements there?

I have a plush Catbus from My Neighbor Totoro that is always hanging out somewhere. There are lots of Red Wings hockey cards and pucks, a Star Wars card with an Ewoks cartoon animation cell, some fossils and a Neanderthal stone knife, the Dune pop-up book from 1984 (opened to the sandworm scene, of course), my Eisner awards, a Warhammer 40K Space Marine figure…

But the biggest thing is original art. I have pages from favorite artists like Julie Doucet, Geneviève Castree, Moebius, Dave Cooper – and of course some favorite drawings by my two sons. There’s also a drawing my wife made for me for Father’s Day years ago, of my son Oscar… riding the Catbus.

Is there an art medium that you’ve never learned but wish you could?

I like pen and paper the most, and I’ve always liked to work small, so I’m pretty satisfied with my process. Which isn’t to say I’m opposed to trying other materials, but I’m not going to force myself to work differently just because I feel like I should. The right idea would need to come along.

I used to think I’d like to make music, but my family can tell you that I cannot sing.

I once spent a couple months starting to learn how to play bass guitar, and that was enough to show me I should stick to drawing.

What is your relationship to paper broadly, and specifically to postal mail?

I still make all my art with physical materials – pen and paper. I like drawing in sketchbooks, I like the feel of the pen on paper. I use digital sparingly – mostly just for scanning images and maybe correcting minor text mistakes.

I still like getting mail, and I try to write back to everyone who sends me physical mail. Getting mail from kids is the best, because their letters and postcards are like mind collages: beautiful little messes.

When can we expect your next postcard set?

I’m working on a Mandalorian and Grogu book currently, so, fingers crossed that Disney might want a postcard set for that. We’ll see!

You’ve wanted to be a comic book artist since you were in preschool. Who have been your main influencers in comic art? How would you say your work differs from theirs?

There have been so many, from Garfield to Mark Alan Stamaty to John Romita, Jr., to Eddie Campbell, Chris Ware, Joann Sfar, Kate Beaton, John Porcellino.

I think my work tends to be a bit more naive than a lot of the work I like, and it may be hard to see the influence.

Maybe it’s more that I draw on the storytelling qualities of the artists more than any superficial stylistic identifier.

Star Wars was the first movie you ever saw in a cinema, and you’ve remained a big fan of the films. Now you’re also a dad. How do these experiences merge in your Star Wars projects?

Even when I’m working with made-up worlds full of aliens and robots, I always start from a grounded place, something personal and real. Sometimes it’s a specific thing that happened or was said, sometimes it’s capturing the feeling behind what happened. I may write something down right after, but I try to live in the moment and not get ahead of myself thinking about how I might use it later.

But people around me have definitely made comments that I should put something in my books.

One unexpected thing about my Star Wars books was thinking I was writing for adults, only to have kids enjoy them just as much, if not more.

What’s something you are proud of, outside of your art?

I’m proud of my kids, although I read somewhere that parents aren’t supposed to tell their kids they’re proud of them because it ties their sense of self accomplishment to parent approval or something. But I think they’re both great!

What’s next for you?

I’m working on a sequel to my middle grade DC superhero book, Batman and Robin and Howard, and also the Star Wars book I mentioned before – The Mandalorian and Child.

After that, I have a ton of projects I’d like to do. I’m most excited to work on my fantasy adventure epic graphic novel, The Fierce Knight.

To learn more about Jeff and his work, check out his website and Instagram page. Jeff has given a number of interviews, where he talks about being a dad, answers questions from a 5 year old, gives tips for up-and-coming artists, talks about the origins of Rey and Pals, or about his comic memoirs (for grown-ups), about screenwriting… or even gives a live art demo! 😍

And now, for the last giveaway of 2023: Clarisse is going to send 4 postcards by Jeff Brown to 4 randomly picked postcrossers! 🎉 To participate, leave a comment below sharing a Star Wars memory or your favorite character. Come back this time next week to check out the winners!