By Nancy Wride | Email the author | March 20, 2011
Illustrating books by two American music icons--Bob Dylan and Wynton Marsalis--has drawn widespread notice for artist Paul Rogers, who charmed fans lined up Saturday to meet him at Apostrophe' Books. But now Rogers is about to appear in the corner of any letter in the country carrying a new U.S. postage stamp.
Next week, the postal service's new Jazz stamp will be released, and Rogers, on the faculty of the Art Center School of Design in Pasadena, created it.
"The art director for the United States Postal Service, Howard Paine, saw my (Marsalis) jazz book and contacted me," said Rogers, who also lives in Pasadena. "It's actually my second stamp."
The first stamp Rogers created was the 2009 Thanksgiving Day Parade stamp. The second one will debut at a March 26 event in New Orleans.
To create the art for the stamp, Rogers used ink on paper and then worked on it digitally, arriving at what he hoped would convey "a visual equivalent of jazz music," he told the Postal Service. Old jazz album covers influenced his work.
On Saturday, Rogers sat at the front of Apostrophe Books with a steady stream of customers wanting their copies signed (there were also Red Velvet cookies). Forever Young, Bob Dylan's children's book with Rogers' entertaining illustrations, was published in 2008. Jazz A-Z, an A to Z Collection of Jazz Portraits, was published in 2005.
Rogers graduated from the Art Center in 1980 and immediately started getting work in illustrating commercial posters and other work. Simon & Shuster went to him for the Jazz book illustrations, perhaps because his style strongly evokes the heydays of the first truly American music.
The books were published a few years back, but they've been ''hot sellers, so we decided to invite the author to visit," said Apostrophe co-owner Valerie Kingsland. Near her Saturday were mother-daughter customers Patti Sowa, a preschool substitute teacher from the Heights, and Linette, in line for Rogers to sign their book. They'd not heard of Rogers the illustrator before, said Sowa: "We actually just saw it as we were walking by, and came in."
Andrew Margolin and his daughter Mekena, 7, waited patiently as Rogers autographed a copy of the Jazz A-Z book by drawing a cartoony hand setting down the needle of a record player on an album: "we hope you dig this book." The title page appears to be an old 33 record inside a brown paper sleeve. This was lost only on the youngest kids.
Mekena clutched a copy of Rogers/Dylan's Forever Young.
"I think it's a great book," Dad Margolin enthused, "and I love the song."
The illustrations are striking and wonderful in the books, and the stamp is bold. Rogers said he feels fortunate to have been able to survive as an illustrator and instructor.
"I was lucky to be making my living as an artist," he said.
The Jazz stamp will be issued March 26 for 44 cents, but as a 'forever' stamp, its value changes when prices go up, Rogers said.
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