It was a mystery for years: Who was the artist behind the memorable, dare-I-say iconic Wrinkle in Time cover that haunted many of our childhoods? Writer S. Elizabeth raised this long-running question back in May with a blog post that got a whole host of internet sleuths involved, including illustrator Michael Whelan and a whole gaggle of Redditors. We thought maybe one of our readers would know—but I’m sorry to say that none of your guesses were correct.
But the mystery has been solved! The WBUR podcast Endless Thread has the answer, which came after a lot—a lot a lot—of digging on the host’s part.
I know you just want to know who it was, but you really ought to give the podcast a listen (or the transcript a read) in order to understand just how much digging this took. The sheer number of people involved! The back-and-forthing! The changing minds! Amory Sivertson, the host of Endless Thread, started messaging anyone who had “Dell” in their LinkedIn profile and eventually found exactly the right person to talk to: Bruce Hall, the former art director at Dell.
Hall took a guess as to who the artist was—a guess that turned out to be correct, but that wasn’t immediately apparent. Confirming it took a lot more questions, and false negatives, and questions about crediting artists, and, eventually, confirmation by family.
The artist who painted that terrifying centaur-pegasus is Richard Bober. Sadly, no one seems to know what happened to the original painting. But at least Bober can now get the credit he’s long deserved.
