About the Best Author Photo of All Time

I took a break from this newsletter last week because I was getting my author photo taken. As someone who loathes being photographed I was more or less dreading the experience, but the photographer was wonderful and I'm happy. Before getting my photo taken I spent time looking at other author photos, hoping for inspiration, and that inevitably led my brain to the memory of what I consider the best author photo of all time.

I can't remember how old I was when I first read Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends. But I can recall with unsparing clarity the back jacket photograph of its author. Whether my eye went first to his glowering visage or his giant, prominently displayed bare foot is a detail lost to time, but the combined effect was one of terror. Here was a man who looked like he'd be more comfortable eating children than writing for them. Here was a man who looked like he passed his spare time swapping pedicure recommendations with Baba Yaga and flossed his teeth with the tendons of songbirds. The fact of the guitar propped next him did nothing to counterbalance the photograph's air of resting malevolence; if anything, it made it even easier to imagine Shel Silverstein as a fairy tale grim reaper whose dissonant guitar picking signaled death's imminent arrival.

I viewed all of Sidewalk through the prism of that author photo, just as I viewed The Giving Tree through this one:

I mean, come on.

I like to imagine the discussions around this photo at Harper & Row, which published The Giving Tree in 1964.

"Shel's been dragging his feet about getting his photo taken."

"That's okay. We've got this mug shot. Let's just use that instead."

or

"All of our authors look too friendly. Do we have anything that will give our readers nightmares about being slowly and methodically chewed to death?"

In retrospect, however, this was actually the perfect photo to accompany The Giving Tree, because The Giving Tree is a horror story.

Likewise, Where the Sidewalk Ends, which Harper & Row published in 1974, is one weird-ass children's book. It's full of satire, irony, darkness, and disquiet. Silverstein's photo functions effectively as a warning to what the reader would find inside both the book and his brain. His bare foot reads as a middle finger extended in the direction of propriety and conventional ideas about what kids can and cannot understand. And his scowl telegraphs the message that while this man won't hesitate to disturb your children, he will also never lie to them.

And this is why it's my favorite author photo of all time. A good author photo will a) lend intrigue to its subject and b) give the reader an idea of what kind of book the subject writes. A great one will do all this and also lodge in the reader's mind and memories with the fervor of a hungry hookworm. That's what Shel Silverstein's resting bitch face and big bare foot did to me. I don't need my own author photo to become someone's Proustian parasite (a girl can dream), but I remain grateful to live in a world where, some fifty years after the fact, someone else's author photo can remain a standard bearer for what shouldn't work in publishing but absolutely, incontrovertibly does.

What I'm consuming this week:

Reading: My Dear You, Rachel Khong's delightfully off-kilter new story collection.

Watching: Every few years I do a re-watch of A Room With A View to be reminded of its near perfection.

Listening: Harry Chapin, "Cat's in the Cradle."