The Penn Stater Magazine

Looks Like We Picked a Timely Cover

December 21, 2009 at 3:40 pm Tina Hay Leave a comment

About six months ago, we were looking at some magazine’s “summer reading list” (I no longer remember which magazine), and our art director said, “What about a winter reading list?”

We got to talking, and decided it would be fun to find a collection of Penn State faculty members who happened to be avid readers and ask them to recommend some good books for cold winter’s nights.

The result should be arriving in your mailboxes in the next week or so, depending on where you live—and assuming, of course, that you’re an Alumni Association member.

The cover illustration, for which we hired a European illustrator named Andy Ward, shows some avid readers hanging out in the snow, engrossed in their books. The snowy cover seems especially appropriate in light of the blizzard that hit the mid-Atlantic states over the weekend. In fact, our printer is based in Strasburg, Va., an area that got a foot and a half of snow—and people in Virginia are not accustomed to getting that much snow. The storm set the printing of the magazine back by about 24 hours, so our Jan-Feb issue is now scheduled to be in the mail on Wednesday instead of tomorrow.

Check back with us after the first of the year—there’s talk that members of the magazine staff will be offering up their top picks for winter reading. In the meantime you can read a short bio of illustrator Andy Ward here and see some other examples of his unusual work here.

Tina Hay, editor

Entry filed under: Covers, Faculty research, Illustrations and Illustrators, The Penn Stater magazine. Tags: Andy Ward, reading.