Richard's Notes

Smithsonian.com has a piece on the late Saul Steinberg’s artist in residency at the Smithsonian: Doodle Dandy.

When I first moved to Connecticut, the late S. Dillon Ripley, the then Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution who invited Steinberg to be artist in residence was my neighbor. He had a second home in Litchfield, Connecticut where he kept rare species of birds among spectacular gardens. Ripley was a well known ornithologist and had written many definitive books on birds.

By the time I met Ripley he was an old man but you could still see what he was about and I could imagine him ranging through India and Africa with a pith helmet looking for birds (and treasures) in days of old when going to such places was high adventure. Raiders of the Lost Arc comes to mind.

Ripley’s wife gave him an early Macintosh (512K) as a birthday present to write what turned out to be his last book, which he never finished. He had no clue about computers and somehow I was enlisted to teach him how to use it. He was a smart man but maybe born in the wrong century as we made only a bit of progress with the computer. Still, it was great fun to hear stories from the character that he was: big tall guy wearing bermuda shorts, a pin-striped shirt and tie, knee socks and wing tips, in the summer. The pith helmet was hanging on the wall by then (literally).

To bring this story full circle, Saul Steinberg was a staff artist at The New Yorker Magazine and last year they published an amazing article by John Seabrook called Ruffled Feathers about an ornithologist, Pamela Rasmussen who unravelled a long-standing fraud in the field (a famous ornithologist falsifying bird specimens). The book that Ripley was working on on his new 512K Mac was The Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide which Dr. Rasmussen co-wrote and finished after his death and during the writing of which she uncovered the fraud.

[via Your Daily Awesome.]