Painting Over the Photos, Vol. 2: A Collector’s Guide to L. Goddard

By Norman I. Platnick

Enchantment Ink is pleased to introduce the 27th volume in our series of full-color guides to American illustrators: Painting Over the Photos, Vol. 2: A Collector's Guide to L. Goddard, by Norman Platnick and Lois Emerson. More than 17 years in the making, this new volume attempts to bring together all the calendar art attributed to “L. Goddard.” Although Goddard produced some of the most evocative calendar art of the 1920’s, she remains poorly known and enigmatic. Some authors have maintained that “L. Goddard” is merely a pseudonym, but we provide a detailed biography of the artist. The book includes full-color images of the calendar art attributed to Goddard (including not only wall and mailing calendars, but also blotters, boxes, fans, jigsaw puzzles, and thermometers), as well as sheet music and magazine pieces. Sections cover her many famous Indian maiden images (around 50 different paintings!), exotic ladies (gypsies, pirates, tropical settings, eastern costumes, and classical settings), and enchanted ladies, as well as her early works and prints featuring couples, gents, moms with babies and kids, families, and children. Appendices cover copyrights and company painting records not yet associated with images, as well as the known calendar art attributed to R. F. Ingerle, who is thought to have collaborated with Goddard on at least a few paintings.

Click here to download this guide, for free.

A note from William Platnick

Hello Enchantment Ink visitor. On April 8th, 2020, the author of all these books, my father, Norman Platnick, died of complications due to a serious fall.

Words cannot describe the amount of pain my family is in right now. My father was a wonderful, humble, loving, passionate and intelligent man. He had 3 passions in life: my mother, spiders and collecting.

As a way of honoring my father's legacy in the illustrated artwork community, I will be turning as many books of his as possible into PDF files and distributing them online, for free.

If you have found these collector's guides useful, I ask that you make a donation to the Norman I. Platnick Memorial Fund, which will be setting up a scholarship in the field of arachnology, my father's career.

If you'd like to learn more about my father and his amazing life (such as skipping middle school and high school and going to college when he was 12), I'd like to lift up just a few pieces:

NY Times: Norman Platnick Obituary
Concord University Magazine Fall 2018: Friendly Neighbordhood Arachnologist page 20
NY Times: The Exciting Adventures of Spider Man
Daily News: NYC'S real-life spider man
NY Times: For Some, an Appliance; for Others, Art
The Wall Street Journal: Warming Up to Spiders

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