Photograph by Nick Schnelle
Daniel Zimmer’s stately two-story brownstone could have served as the backdrop for a Norman Rockwell canvas—and frankly, that seems apt, given Zimmer’s role in crafting Illustration, a quarterly magazine devoted to classic illustrators.
“I was always really interested in old-fashioned illustrators, and the amount of information about those guys is very limited,” Zimmer relates in his tidy home studio. “I always thought, ‘I wish there were a whole magazine devoted to illustrators.’” Eventually, he resolved to launch just such a magazine, and Illustration debuted late in 2001.
That first issue featured a lead story on painter Haddon Hubbard Sundblom, whose Coca-Cola ad art effectively visualized Santa Claus as Americans nowadays know the character. Since then, Illustration has covered artists ranging from Conan/Tarzan titan Frank Frazetta to women’s-magazine wonder Al Parker.
After coming of age in Kirkwood, Zimmer attended Parsons, the distinguished Greenwich Village design school. Then, when New York proved characteristically unwelcoming, he returned here to seek an art-based career. (His first published graphic? A gouache for the September 1990 SLM.)
His training has since served him well in producing Illustration, now on its 27th issue. “I design everything,” he notes. “I do all the photo retouching, do all layouts. I pack every box.” Zimmer also commissions photographers and, for obvious reasons, obsesses about the quarterly’s reproduction quality, all in service to the labor-of-love stories submitted to him by freelance writers. (“A lot of the articles in the magazine sometimes take years to develop,” he confides.)
Zimmer estimates Illustration’s print run at 10,000 copies per issue, with 1,000 subscribers, and those numbers have stayed stable despite the recession. Moreover, the magazine’s subscription roll includes a number of celebs—George Lucas, to name one. “Tony Bennett has been a subscriber since the very beginning,” Zimmer also notes. “Before he was a singer, he was wanting to be an illustrator.”
Barnes & Noble, Borders, and other national booksellers carry Illustration, as do comics shops like Star Clipper locally. Otherwise, says Zimmer, “It goes everywhere—from Indonesia to China, one guy in Russia, all over the place.”
Among his own favorite illustrators, finally, Zimmer names longtime Saturday Evening Post cover artist J.C. Leyendecker, as well as Norman Saunders and Reynold Brown (about whom his Illustrated Press just published lovely hardbacks). Oh—and he also expresses fondness for a gent named Rockwell.
For more information about Illustration and The Illustrated Press, visit illustration-magazine.com or call 314-577-6768. A four-issue subscription to the magazine costs $60.
