All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
You may not know the name, but you most probably know the art. Leo and Diane Dillon got their start creating joint illustrations in the 1950s. They produced record album covers (remember those?), children's books, and book covers for science fiction classics.
Among their most famous works are the covers of one of the editions of the Madeline L'Engle A Wrinkle in Time series and the paperback editions of Harlan Ellison's works.
They also produced their own award-winning books. They received Caldecott Medals for the folktale Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears and Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions, a description of the continent's culture in alphabet book form.
But one of my family's favorite Leo and Diane Dillon books was Pish, Posh Said Hieronymous Bosch, by Nancy Willard, which incorporates elements of the art of the eccentric fifteenth-century Flemish painter in a silly story. The Dillons' son Lee created the picture frame used all in the illustrations.
I heard the couple speak way back when I was a student at Parsons School of Design, which is where they met. But everything I was going to relate about their work and their unique collaboration – neither would ever describe who did what in the works they produced jointly – is here in this piece in The New York Times.
Leo Dillon died May 26, 2012 at the age of 79. He is survived by his wife and son.
