The Snowman Expert

Bob Eckstein is a commercial artist and writer who splits his time between Hamlin, PA and New York City.  For over twenty years he has been in most major publications around the world as a columnist, cartoonist, illustrator, graphic designer, photographer, and subject.  He has appeared on about 40 magazine covers and he swears that in the ‘80s, he was big in Japan.  He is married to renowned book artist, Tamar Stone (they eloped in Iceland), and their Manhattan apartment houses many collections, including 800+ pieces of snowman memorabilia just in their living room.  Bob spends his free time playing street hockey in Chinatown (Mike Myers is a teammate), playing tennis at Columbia University, and doing land preservation stuff as a trustee for his neighbor in Pennsylvania, The Lacawac Sanctuary.  This diversified fellow is a what’s known in the biz as a “freelancer.”

The Authoring Auctioneer: You’re a freelancer.  Does that mean that you joust pro bono or something else?

Bob Eckstein: My job has one thing in common with Victoria Secret models: we both work in our underwear. Freelancing means you don’t have a full-time job, but get work-for-hire.  It can be for anything.  In my case it would be for cartooning, illustration, writing, etc.  So I work from home and I’m essentially my own boss.  Thing is, very few full-time jobs exist for illustrators and cartoonists…

AA: Your blog is called “Freelancer’s Lament.”  What the hell are you so sorry about?

BE: Every person who freelances, no matter how big a name they are, has experienced a slump, a period when work stops and he or she second-guesses their decision to work for themselves.  It’s a difficult question for those less famous who are on the fence… and it’s not a question of just convincing themselves to “just do it.”  This country has a mentality that everyone should follow his or her dreams.  Sorry, but this thinking is actually dangerous, as many people (I’m speaking in terms of the arts, really) are simply not going to make it.  I see those around me who haven’t started their lives after twenty years of rejections and I’ve seen it while I taught at The Pratt Institute and School of Visual Arts with students who got accepted because they had the cash to pay for the ridiculous tuition.  I say stop having unattainable dreams.  As George Carlin (I think) said, “your eyes are closed when you’re dreaming.”  In the arts, there are many scary-talented people and too few jobs.  Thus, the lament.

AA: When you were young, wide-eyed, and innocent, where did you imagine you would be now in your life?

BE: Growing up in the projects of the South Bronx as an odd, ugly white kid, I just tried to get by and didn’t have any expectations of life.  My best friend Joe and I both had to stay indoors, more or less.  We actually spent a lot of time drawing, copying Peanuts cartoons, and painting hockey uniforms on plastic army men after school.  (He went to the School of Visual Arts to be an illustrator but instead became Playgirl’s Man of the Year and does soft-porn now.)  Anyway, by high school, my parents, thank God, moved us out to Long Island and I had opportunities, which, I gotta boast, I really made the most of.  I was very competitive, like a street rat, and made up my mind I was going to go to college by getting a scholarship.  I took up tennis and studied art in a big way, and when I was a junior I was offered many full scholarships for both.  I had no use for school pep rallies, high school girls, or anything there, so I stopped going to high school and began sitting in art colleges after a friend filled me in that while professors take attendance, they won’t notice you if you don’t belong there and you’re not registered.

No, I never expected anything to be easy-and it wasn’t.  Only now am I wide-eyed as I try new things that challenge me without the pressure of survival.  So to answer your question, I’m pleasantly surprised, no… shocked is a better word, to find myself at this point: nice home, cool wife, a bar-q-b, etc.

AA: Do you ever feel like you should have a “normal job,” such as selling insurance or branding cattle?

BE: When I was in school out in Long Island, I tried working at a golf course as a starter.  By 6:30 AM, a little over an hour after I began my first job ever, the owner of the country club came racing down the hill in a golf-cart to the starter hut where I was sending off foursomes and kind of joking with some of the cigar-chompers.  My new boss was looking around wondering why everyone was smiling and having a good time.  Then he announced that the Springlake Country Club did not hire drug users and he fired me.  I wasn’t on drugs, just naturally sociable.  I promised myself I would never work for someone else ever again… and I never have punched a time-clock since.

AA: So, what’s your ultimate goal with all this freelancing?

BE: All freelancers want to do whatever they love doing as their main source of income.  That’s the ultimate goal for the majority who walked away from their day jobs.

I did set individual goals for each of the avenues I went down… I wanted to illustrate and write humor for Sports Illustrated, Village Voice, SPY, National Lampoon, magazines I read growing up.  Once I did that, I got disenchanted with magazines, feeling like that song, “Is That All There Is?” and I set a goal to publish a book.  It took me over 6 years and (full disclosure) I thought it would do well enough that I would walk away from publishing altogether to pursue something different, like cartooning or a return to fine art painting, which I enjoyed success in.  Anyway, when I finished my book, Sam Gross invited me to the famous New Yorker.  In a stroke of luck, I got in on the first try, something I’m told rarely happens. Lunch on Tuesdays (for my birthday).  I’m a big fan of Sam’s and we had met when I bought his cartoons to illustrate my book… A real twist of fate, because I had a good time at that luncheon, met many of my heroes, and decided then to try to be a cartoonist for them.

I don’t have any goals anymore, as I have long given up thinking I’ll ever generate any substantial income from it, and probably not even as much as I made as a kid in my heyday when I was a big shot in magazines in the ‘80s.  Like the song says, “So let’s break out the booze, and let’s keep drawing (or dancing, whatever).”

AA: When we die, we all leave behind a legacy, whether it is a private one within a family group or a public one for the entire world to forever remember.  As an artist, what do you want to leave behind?  How do you hope history will remember you?

BE: I have zero interest in that.  I really don’t.  Stems from my family having no sentimentality or sense of heritage… no heirlooms or photos… whatever.  They don’t even keep in touch outside the immediate family.

I just try to accomplish as much as possible now.  Treat people well and that includes myself.  Not that I’m not a team player.  I am and do a lot of free charity stuff.  But once I die, I’m off the team.  I don’t expect anyone to care what mark I leave behind.

AA: You wrote a book, The History of the Snowman.  Tell me about it.

BE: It’s the first adult non-fiction book about the snowman’s real history.  What’s great is that it takes a lame topic and turns it on its head to reveal shocking real facts, which include sex and violence.  My inspiration was Tim Burton’s Batman, when he took that campy, white bread TV character and gave it another dimension.  As many reviews have stated, after reading The History of the Snowman, you’ll never look at snowmen the same way again.  It covers little known events like the Miracle of 1511, The Massacre of 1690, historical benchmarks previously overlooked, and I prove that snowman-making is one of the earliest forms of folk-art, pornography, and political commentary known to man.  It includes amazing illustrations and photos (like one of the first photographs ever which happens to be of a snowman) and an intermission in the middle of the book of the world’s best snowman cartoons.  Sorry to come across as such a salesman of the book.  It’s just that the subject gets me really excited.

AA: The research for your book is extremely extensive.  It seems like you uncovered facts about snowmen that no one ever went looking for before.  What was the hardest part about compiling your facts?

BE: The research went like a dream.  I spent six years traveling around the world meeting with the leading experts at institutes, professors of cultural history, and the top archaeologists in the world.  But from the start, I realized I was uncovering stories no one ever heard of and I felt like I had just found a winning lottery ticket.  The hardest part of the book is convincing others that it is not a children’s book and that my story is real.

AA: Was there ever a time when you thought, “This is impossible!  What am I doing?”

BE: Never.  From the beginning of my detective work, I uncovered great material so I never doubted for a minute I made the right choice trying to solve the mystery of who made the first snowman.  The book could have been about who made the first joke or the first sandwich, but thank God I went with snowmen.  I’m very confidant now with the title “Snowman Expert” and other historians have called me “the leading authority on snowmen… there is no one better qualified to tell this story.”

AA: What kind of reception has your book received?  What kind of success?

BE: Very flattering.  The highlights have been Amazon.com picking it (out of three million books), “Best Book of the Season.”  The Smoking Gun dot com called it “brilliant.”  Many people have sent me compliments, some famous.  My favorite is a hand-written note from Monty Python’s Michael Palin, who said it was excellent and called me funny.  He asked that we meet up when he comes to NYC.  I think I’ll find the time in my busy schedule.

Financially is a totally different story.  The book, so far, has only broken even.  It cost me tens of thousands of dollars to purchase the rights to all the photos, artwork, and quotes used in the book.  My publisher kept suggesting I skip things and leave out the expensive items, but I knew a book of this kind would only be done once and I wanted to get it right and be comprehensive.  I haven’t even sold enough to exceed the modest advance I received.  The book has had a lot of bad breaks: 5 different editors, possible spot on Letterman but then the writer’s strike, a news break on the Iraq war bumped me from CBS’s Sunday Morning…

AA: Your book is loaded with facts and great stories, but it also has a comedic tone to it, almost like it’s making fun of itself for being so serious about snowmen.  Who should read History of the Snowman?  Why the humor?

Snowman from a circa 1380 manuscript.

BE: I love history and I hate when people suck the fun out of it.  I made a conscious effort to not try to be a “writer,” but just tell the story like I would to my buddies.  I have no grand illusions to what I did with this book.  There are a trillion other books and Ernest Hemingway (I’m sure) never had to erect snowmen in Barnes & Noble display windows.  The stories I found about snowmen made this book a slam-dunk.  No writer could have made the snowman’s story boring.

AA: And how would one buy a copy?

BE: Amazon.com or ask any bookstore (and if they’re out, and most are, please request it, as that really helps the book.  Thanks!)

AA: If you died tomorrow, and were denied all things earthly in the afterlife, what would be the five things you miss the most about life?

BE: The knee-jerk reaction is to give a smart-ass answer, but I’ll avoid the lazy route.

Not just highly personal, but a painful question… One which, if you’re not careful, will make you look like a fool.  That said, I’ll try to be philosophical, or at least logical: pens, phones, black leggings, tennis balls, and snow.

AA: The five things you would miss the least?

BE: Menudo.

AA: What’s next?

BE: I recently became a regular cartoonist for a few magazines including Reader’s Digest, Harvard Business Review and this great green magazine called Plenty.  I’m currently working on two new books: The Sea Below Us, a graphic novel comedy on the perils of arctic exploration, and What Is So Funny About Peace, Love & Global Warming? a collection of green-themed cartoons.  Meanwhile, my illustrations will be appearing in Money Adviser magazine and the Times sports section.  And finally, I will continue producing the online magazine Today’s Snowman for the re-release this holiday of my book The History of the Snowman.

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P.S.  I did read History of the Snowman. I was blown away by the research involved, I was fascinated by the amount of history surrounding something as humble as a snowman, and I was thoroughly entertained by the way Bob told the story.  I highly recommend buying a copy.  You won’t be disappointed.