Endless Thread - Episodes we love: Artist Known

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

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!

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. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Ben Brock Johnson. Amory Siebertson. Happy spooky week.

Woo. 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 Endless Dread. Yes. So this year's installment of Endless Dread is coming out on Friday. 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. 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. Like the one we have for you today. We are revisiting an episode, one of the best from our 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. So we hope you enjoy this episode, and then we hope you'll meet us back here on Friday for Endless Dread. See you soon. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. It was a dark and stormy night.

For real, this is how you're going to kick this off? Yes, it's a mystery. And it's, well, you'll see. Whatever you say, Aima. You ready? It was a dark and stormy night. I mean, I'm pretty sure it was a sunny spring afternoon, but okay. Thank you for doing this.

No problem. I'm so excited. When we met Sarah Elizabeth. I feel like I haven't talked to a blogger in a minute. That's because nobody blogs anymore. At least nobody reads blogs anymore, which is really sad. 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. More hits than I've ever gotten in an entire decade of 20 years of writing. And a lot of those hits have come from Redditors. Sarah shared this specific blog post in a handful of subredits recently because she needed help. She came up against something in the midst of her writing, or rather niche writing, we should say.

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. 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. It's in these hyper-saturated, really lurid colors. Greens and blues of every shade, seafoam, cerulean. 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. 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. It's very handsome. It's a handsome face is what you're trying to say. That face just glowering at you. It's kind of terrifying.

Can confirm hovering above that joy sucking face? There's a man, Pegasus hybrid. A winged centaur, if you will. Yeah, with a human face that looks cut from marble and a torso like a Greek god attached to an equally chiseled horses lower half, suspended by these delicate, almost contradictory rainbow pastel wings. 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.

Up until that point, it was all believable to you. Yeah, exactly. I find the colors of the cover and the painting so freaky, and I could not tell you why. They just caused this weird, low-level hum that's really just full of dread in my heart. But for Sarah, a self-proclaimed gloom and, quote, 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... I couldn't even remember what it was from. 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 Madeline Lengel's Yongell's...

young adult's sci-fi fantasy novel, A Rinkle in Time. The opening line of which is... It was a dark and stormy night. Okay, all right, all right. Remember that old classic? Honestly, the only thing I really remember in the book is that someone ate a liverwurst sandwich. 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. What does that have to do, the glowering red-eyed face in a ripped rainbow-winged Pegasus Centaur? It might feel like a mystery for the uninitiated, but it's still not our mystery. 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? And I thought, ah, pish-posh. Surely I'm going to find this like in the first page of Google. No. No, no, no. 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.

Sarah posed the question in the Unresolved Mystery Subreddit and got hundreds of replies. many of which said, hey, that's the cover of the copy I had growing up. Which is cool, but despite how iconic this illustration seemed to be, nobody knows who the cover artist for this book is. But there are two kinds of people in this world. People who hear nobody knows and think, huh, I guess nobody knows. And people who think, uh-uh, no way, uh-uh, I'm going to find it.

Or I'm going to find someone who can find it. or in this case, someone who can help me find someone who can find it. And it was subsequent Redditors from that post who said, oh, try this subreditor. Oh, try this one. And that's how I got to you guys. A Redator who goes by Nutella Time 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. No, 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. And that was eight months ago. 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-month long quest through time and space. to find an artist credit gone mysteriously missing, and to understand the forces that have left this covers artist and countless others unknown for decades. These artists deserve recognition, and, you know, people need to know their names. I'm Amory Siebertson. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR distributing mystery-solving credit

where it's due giving. Station. Today's episode. Artist Known. Sarah Elizabeth had already done a fair amount of digging into this mystery

by the time she wrote her various posts about the Rinkle 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. 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? Artist. Sure did. Absolute nightmare fuel, just like you asked. Other listicles name the artists behind the different covers, but when you get to this 1976 one, you see artist unknown. Sarah also DM'd A Rinkle in Time author Madeline Langel's granddaughter on Twitter. All I got back was a shrug emoji, so she doesn't know either, apparently. So Sarah didn't have too much to work with, but also there was something getting in her way. I'm very shy, and I don't like meeting people or talking to people or interact.

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. But as I told Sarah, where she draws the line is where I pick up the line. You know what I'm saying? Pish pos. I am a professional pain in the ass, and I will pick up the phone and call anyone, and I will call all of their surviving children, and I will try to get to that person. Well, with this mystery technically, push in 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.

I 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. A string folded in half bringing point A and point B together almost instantaneously. That's how you wrinkle time. 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. Wrinkling 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-L. Dell Publishing. 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, Dell doesn't exist anymore. Not really.

Because the publishing world is one of acquisitions, almost to a comical extent. Dell was acquired by Doubleday the same year this paperback edition came out, Double Day was acquired by Bertelsman who formed Bentham Double Day Dell. Burdelsman acquired Random House, then Random House merge with Penguin, making Penguin Random House. 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 We no longer have these extremely old files. Good luck to all who are curious. So, when paper records fail, it's time to dig into the human records, Ben. Uh.

AKA, it's time to message some Randos on LinkedIn who have any iteration of Dell publishing listed on their resumes. That sounds like a lot of fun. You know, I did have a lot of fun on this journey, especially because that led me to someone named Judy Gittinstein, editor, writing coach, secret weapon, which is her actual email signature. What? But it's also... Does it say it on her business card?

Probably. I don't, you know, we were emailers. We were email buds. Fair. But it is true. She was a secret weapon because Judy, pointed me to Bruce Hall.

Bruce Hall is a New Yorker, clearly. New Yorker. New Yorker. But he was also the art director for Dell at the time this paperback edition of Rinkle and Time came out. And he, yeah, he remembered it. It was a beautiful painting for that title. And did he remember who did that beautiful painting? I wish I could, you know, this is going to drive me nuts now.

No. Welcome to the club. To be fair, we are going back almost 50 years here. We're in ancient history now. Yes, but Bruce is the guy who would have commissioned this wrinkle 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 Centron. It's similar, but I don't think it's Milo.

Does the name Ray Fibush or Faye Bush mean anything? No, no, it does not. Charles Santory? Yes, I'm familiar with him, but I don't think it was him. 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? Hewens is a more delicate painter than this, you know, so the styles are not comparable at all.

Yeah, Emery, come on. the styles aren't comparable at all. Oh, pish-posh. But my name game maybe wasn't totally hopeless, because Bruce eventually came up with the name himself that he wanted me to look into. Uh, bober? Bober.

Richard Bober. I looked him up immediately, of course, and I found a sight with an image gallery of his work. And did you see centaurs and handsome, terrifying, glowering faces? and greens and blues galore? Far from it, Ben, far from it. There were studies of nude women. Okay.

Yeah, realistic paintings of ladies in these elegant gowns. There were fiery oranges and peachy pink color palettes, pencil sketches, pirates with rugged faces. This doesn't sound right. Did any of them have ridiculously small wings on them? 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 Boebers, and I was like, okay, Bruce, I think you got the wrong guy.

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. 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... Professional pain in the ass? 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? I'll wake up tonight and, you know, it'll come to me, I think. 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? That's a promise. 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 Palancar. 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. 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. I don't know who it is. Good luck to you. It would be a long shot. 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. Who knew that sleuthing for one cover could reach such epic proportions, she wrote? Followed by... It's definitely not Bober.

I'd emailed Bober's previous agent, too, Jill Bowman. 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? 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. Sorry, sorry. Sorry, who's agent in particular? The artists who did that cover that were looking for? 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's still alive or likely no? 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 Bomb 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 Bomb.

It got a little nuts. Clearly. 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. More in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew.

Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent.

Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org. Creative Studio. Great news, Ben. Yeah, this is Darwin Bomb. I was recommended to Amory by Bruce Hall. He's alive.

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. 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. My human records were failing me. So I went back to paper records. Really, we did. Check, check, check, check, check, check. To Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Rinkle in Time author Madeline Lengel's alma mater in the key, 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. Yeah. Requests and appreciation from publishers. We were tearing through these boxes. As much as one can in a pin drop quiet studious archery. Kival Library. Thinking maybe somewhere in them there was a mention of the artist who illustrated the 1976 paperback edition, maybe? Who are these people? I think they're just like contacts.

What? It's like a contact list. But we had a very small window of time to work with and some appropriately strict rules to follow. You can't take anything out of that right now. Why not? Because you can only take one thing out at a time and we have a folder out already. Okay. I was stressing. Well, you did show up like an hour and a half wait. That's usually my move. We really swapped roles that day. We did, but some things stay the same, and that is that I was very stressed.

Ben was... You can look, but no touchy. He was being Ben. There's a lot of Bill correspondence to... And there's some very confusing correspondence from Bill to Bill. All right, what I would like to do. Just keep going. Just keep going. You're doing great. The idea of 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 might not be anywhere near the actual haystack. All right, let's go get some vegan pizza. Yes. Please. It's the only thing that has made me not totally lose my will to live in this very moment. Sorry. Ben, with every mystery we've ever worked on, there comes a time when we ask ourselves a very important question. Where does Amory get her vegan pizza?

Oh, we can talk about that later. I'm happy to share that. I know all the spots. No, the question is, is this? actually solvable. Right. Will we ever know for sure who illustrated this cover? My guess is that we will not. 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,

an 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. 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 hire jobs often mean that someone's work goes admired, but not attributed. That's just business, you might say. But in this case, the artist's names could so easily have been printed somewhere, anywhere on the books their illustrations adorned. Certainly, the people that I speak to today pretty uniformly don't 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 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. No. Yes. Publishers burning paintings?

That sounds dramatic. 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 ring. and 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 it did, sometimes it didn't.

Despair settled like a stone in the pit of my stomach. That also sounds dramatic. 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 all. Also, pretty sad. But my conversation with Adam Rowe wasn't all dark and stormy vibes. Okay, whew, this is bumming me out. I was going to have to go for pizza round two. 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. I will say, Richard Bober sure does look like. a really good candidate. Bober, the guy Bruce, the art director thinks, did it. 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. That is definitely a pretty serious blow against the theory, but... 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 Polsom, also suggesting Bober. A thread that I'd set aside.

after Jane said no, honestly. But it pointed out the similarities between the Rinkle and 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. Red eyes. on that one

that one guy. 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 about this, but like the head kind of has a butt crack.

Oh, sure. Do you know what I mean? Where the heads both have a like a center part but no hair. That is a really interesting feature for them to both share. My artistic guy Not so bad after all, huh, Ben?

You can spot butt crack heads a mile away. It really looks like what you'd expect to see from an illustrator who's doing a bunch of horror influence covers has sort of a set of ideas and tools that they're returning to. Did Jane or Jill... Bober's agents, present and past... ...give you more information of it than just saying it was not Boeber? It's definitely not Boeber.

verified with Jill Bauman. No, that's all that she said. Why do they both seem confident about that? That is an excellent question. 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...

Keep pulling the Richard Bober thread. That's my recommendation. I sent them both an email with the subject line, are you sure it's not Bober? Two days later, I got a response. And then a call. Hi, Jane, can you hear me okay? Yes, I can.

Jane Frank, Bober'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 Bober. Oh, man, Jane. It turns out not only was she not. sure the wrinkle artist wasn't Bober. She had apparently already started considering the possibility that it was. I'm sort of like you in a way. I'm a sleuth. Okay. And so I said, wait a minute.

Why not go back to the source? Now, again, Richard Bober died last December. But his brother, Leon is still alive. And Leon's two sons, Leon Bober III and Matthew Bober are apparently pretty familiar with their uncle's work. Leon the third especially. Every single thing his uncle has ever done. Who knew? So Richard Bober'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 going to cut it for this sleuth. I'm on your side. I'm just as curious as you are. I think it was like, you know, the first book that I had read. that he did the cover too. So I remember having it in school

and talking about how an uncle did the cover. This is Matthew Bober, one of Richard Bober's nephews. And Matthew says he's seen this painting with his own two eyes at his uncle Richard's house. 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. The wrinkle in time cover was painted on Masonite, Matthew says. It's like a thick, super compressed cardboard. Maybe 15 by 22 or 23 or whatever, somewhere around there. Just kind of a normal illustration size.

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. Uh-oh. And not on purpose. Uh-oh.

Yeah, in case the whole paintings leaning against the basement wall bit hadn't already tipped you off. My uncle was not the best archive keeper. Of the work that was in his possession, 15% was destroyed by his cats and a moldy basement filled with water. Oh, no. Oh, yes. A lot was destroyed that way. And 5% is gone totally. I have no idea where it is.

Rinkle in Time is one of those. 15% of everything is destroyed by cats, Amory. That's a law of the universe. And at least I'd say 17% is destroyed by rabbits. More rabbits than cats? Wow. I don't know. She's going through a destructive phase right now.

Shots fired at Amory's buddy tulip. 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. I would call it an informal archiving, you know, taking the painting outside with a 35-millimeter and slide film and shooting it. That's what he would do. Boxes of slides. 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. 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. 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 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 this long-lost, uncredited, iconic piece of nightmare fuel. 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 just painting because definitely he knew the value of what he did and wasn't humble about that.

So he definitely would be like, yeah, that's my painting. 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. He had no cell phone, no computer. He had no long-distance service. The only way I could contact him was to call him. He couldn't call me. A recluse, Jane calls him. In nearly 30 years of representing him, she only met him once.

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. 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 Richards, you can hear the impact his uncle had on him, even from a young age. You would always let me sit there and watch and 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 I learned incredible a lot from that to see what it meant to be a professional, you know, and just watch that.

I can't even describe what that meant to me. 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. His work was memorable for being so anachronistic. At a time when 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. 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 Rinkle 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 Rinkle cover was done by him. So we got to go back to Sarah Elizabeth, right? Our blogger and author and mystery giver,

what does she think? 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. The ironic thing, Ben, is that Sarah actually was familiar with Richard Bober before this, really just with one piece of his.

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. 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. 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.

So it kills me, but the book's already printed. You know what? Second edition of The Art of Fantasy. That's very true. 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 Rinkle in Time original, like the original original. We got more than a slide? 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. 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. 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. Let's make sure that Bober's work isn't a mystery.

anymore. Hell yeah. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by me, Amory Siebertson, and co-hosted by me and... Ben Brock Johnson, mix and sound design by Emily Jenkowski. The rest of our team includes Quincy Walters, Grace Tatter, Dean Russell, Matt Reed, Paul Vicus, and Summata Joshi. This episode is dedicated to Sarah Elizabeth's dad, who was an artist himself and who died unexpectedly between when she brought her. the mystery to us and when it got solved. 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. Endless Threat 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 slash endless thread. 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 Gittinstein, Jane Frank, Adam Rowe, Mike Jackson and Michael Waylon, Tim Komen, Fred Taraba, Bina Williams at Smith College, Chris Hime from Books of Wonder, and Nettella Time on Reddit, who put us on Sarah Elizabeth's radar in the first place. All of which is a great reminder that if you, too, have an unsolved mystery and untold history or some other wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless thread at wbUR.org.