Among us, we three handled quite a few small commissions, from spot drawings for advertising agencies uptown to magazine work and quick lettering jobs. Each of us had his own specialty besides. George did wonderful complicated pen-and-ink drawings like something out of a medieval miniature: hundreds of delicate details crammed into an eight by ten sheet and looking as if they had been done under a jeweler's glass. He also drew precise crisp spots, which he sold to various literary and artistic journals, The New Yorker, for instance, or Esquire. I did book jackets and covers for paperback reprints: naked girls huddling in corners of dingy furnished rooms while at the doorway, daring the cops to take him, is the guy in shirt sleeves clutching a revolver. The book could be The Brothers Karamazov, but it would still have the same jacket illustration. I remember once I did a jacket for Magpie Press; the book was a fine historical novel about Edward 3,, and I did a week of research to get the details just right: the fifteenth century armor, furnishings, clothes. I even ferreted out the materials from which shields were made -- linden wood covered with leather -- so I'd get the light reflections accurate. McKenzie, the art editor, took one look at my finished sketch and said, ``Nothing doing, Rufus. In the first place, it's static; in the second place, it doesn't look authentic; and in the third place, it would cost a fortune to reproduce in the first place -- you've got six colors there including gold.'' I said, ``Mr. McKenzie, it is as authentic as careful research can make it.'' He said, ``That may be, but it isn't authentic the way readers think. They know from their researches into television and the movies that knights in the middle ages had beautiful flowing haircuts like Little Lord Fauntleroy, and only the villains had beards. And girls couldn't have dressed like that -- it isn't transparent enough.'' In the end, I did the same old picture, the naked girl and the guy in the doorway, only I put a Lord Byron shirt on the guy, gave him a sword instead of a pistol, and painted in furniture from the stills of a costume movie. McKenzie was as happy as a clam. ``That's authenticity,'' he said.