An Artist's Life, Digitized: Prehistoric Man

Created by Grady Lyda

THE EVOLUTION AND LIFE OF PREHISTORIC MAN AND HIS ANCESTORS
by GRADY LUTHER LYDA III

Constructing a Handmade Book

This was put together in 1968, and the off-centered title looks stupid with the unnecessarily hyphenated words. If I made it today I would fix that, and I would also need to revise the title to be gender-nuetral, such as: The World of Prehistoric Humans and Their Ancestors. I used heavy cardboard to make the front & back covers and glued white paper onto them. When the book was done, I coated the whole thing with Elmer's glue to give a glossy appearance to the surface because when white-glue dries, it is transparent.

Inside Front Cover

Pages 1 and 2

Getting it Wrong

Above, you can see a blurry sentence at the bottom-right that says, "NOTE: This book consists of 98% plagiarism, and 2% of grossly incorrect information." Creating this book was good practice for becoming a Graphic Designer later in life. I learned about text layout, margins, proofing, shortcuts, book binding and potential copyright violations. An example of my many mistakes can be found in the pagination: Above we see how I put Page 1 at the left & Page 2 on the right. Oops. In the real world, Page 1 and every other odd number always appears on the right-side (recto), while even numbers should go on the left (verso).

Pages 3 and 4

Poor Man's Stationery

I was 13 years old when I created this thing and I had zero budget for it, so I needed to rely on my ingenuity. I noticed that our new set of Encyclopedia Britannicas oddly had 2 blank pages at the beginning & end of each volume, so I removed these bonus sheets with an X-Acto knife, then used masking tape to assemble them into my book.

Pages 11 and 12

Many of my drawings, such as the ones above-right, were made by carefully copying illustrations using tracing paper, then flipping the sheet over and rubbing the backside with a dull pencil, magically transferring the image to the page.

Pages 15 and 16

I destroyed a few books and magazines by cutting them up and pasting the pictures into my masterpiece. The most important source for art and information was the excellent Time-LIFE book, Early Man by Francis Clark Howell, 1968.

Pages 19 and 20 - Preparing for the Elephant Drive

Art on Page 21 - Elephant Hunt

Art on Page 22 - Celebration After the Hunt

Pages 25 and 26

Pages 27 and 28

In Game of Thrones, I was amused to see the use of ancient weapons that had some sort of mysterious property rendering them lethal to the evil White Walkers. Above are some paleolithic tools which, in "A Song of Ice and Fire," are called dragonglass or obsidian.

According to author GRR Martin, he has given these prehistoric relics “magical characteristics that of course real obsidian doesn't necessarily have. After all, we live in a world that has no magic. My world does have magic, so it's a little bit different."

Pages 41 and 42

I soon became exhausted from drawing and writing everything myself, so I cheated a little bit with this section. I included pages from a scholarly Scientific American article from February 1968.