Patent Depending: The Early Years

This is Steven M. Johnson's seventh book. It covers his early years, starting when he was holed up with a drafting table and bed in a small space directly under the staircase of an empty, rented corner grocery store in Oakland, CA from 1963-65. It shows his first cartooning assignments for magazines in 1966-67, and his breakthrough in 1974 when he discovered a taste for thinking up and illustrating original, unusual product ideas, while working on assignment for The Sierra Club Bulletin (renamed Sierra). This book includes the tear sheets from the first five years of his 17 years as an artist for a newspaper, The Sacramento Bee. It also offers notes about types of drawing pens, drawing style, personal improvement in technique, and his peculiar, obsessive habit of drawing multiple versions of a single illustration. The 218-page book fills a gap in his record as an artist, taking the reader up to May, 1983 when he signed a contract for his first book, "What The World Needs Now."