The Magic Pen of Joseph Clement Coll

Joseph Clement Coll was born in 1881, the son of an Irish bookbinder. Self-taught from the works of Vierge, Pyle and Abbey, his talent was such that he was taken on as an apprentice newspaper artist on the New York American at the age of 17. He quickly learned the skills of a reporter and was sent to Chicago for more training. He returned to New York in 1901 where he worked on the newly-formed Sunday North American. The editor of the paper saw his talent and rewarded it with challenging assignments to which he often contributed in the lettering and design.Coll's innovations were dramatic and popular. It wasn't long before he was drawing for Colliers, Everybody's and the Associated Sunday Magazine, among others. He was illustrating fantastic stories by the most popular authors of the day: Arthur Conan Doyle's Sir Nigel and The Lost World (also collected into book form in 1912), Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu (Colliers circa 1913), many stories by Talbot Mundy, The Messiah of the Cylinder by Victor Rousseau (post apocalyptic science fiction in 1917), tales of Africa by Edgar Wallace, even a collection of stories from Dickens in 1910.