While it did well, he realized he couldn’t get by on a $200 book deal each year, so he used his natural creative restlessness to his advantage. Ultimately, he said, “The audience was the trash can.” He decided to freelance and published his first book, The Wing on a Flea, in 1961. Army, where he used his sign painting skills to get himself reassigned from digging ditches and other grunt work.Įmberley’s first job was in advertising, which was good practice, but he hated that it was disposable work, quickly glanced at and tossed. He served for a couple of years in the U.S. He attended what is now the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he met his life partner, Barbara, who was a fashion design major. Though there were books around the house, Ed never read much until a copy of The Wizard of Oz in the Cambridge Public Library sparked a love of reading. There were always pencils and paper around, and Emberley had a knack for drawing.
Young Emberley played with the carpenter’s off-cut triangles as blocks and watched his dad draw letters using a grid. His father was a carpenter and handyman who occasionally painted signs, and his mother worked in retail stores. The hardest part about being an Emberley fan is keeping up with him.Įmberley was born in 1931 and grew up in Cambridge in a working-class family with two brothers. You can even get yourself a copy of the big coffee table book, Ed Emberley, that Todd Oldham and I did a few years ago (it’s very nice!).
Come see this exhibition (and bring friends!), or trawl the rare-book seas to track down as many of his 100+ books as you can (good luck!). Emberley lives with the insecurity that his artistic detractors would say “he’s just looking for a style.” But once you observe the variety of his work, you will be glad that Emberley bores easily, because he’ll never bore you.
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