ARNOLD ROTH: HALL OF FAMER

A press release from the Society of Illustrators announced that Arnold Roth, famed freelance illustrator and cartoonist, is one of five new inductees elected to the Society’s Hall of Fame. For 50 years, Roth’s work has appeared regularly in nearly every major American magazine from TV Guide and Time to Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker. Contemporary illustrator Paul Davis and posthumous honorees Mario Cooper, Laurence Fellows and Herbert Morton Stoops were also inducted at a black-tie dinner at the Society’s headquarters on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on June 25.

Throughout his career, Roth has created memorably antic cartoons, advertisements, album covers and book jackets. He wrote and illustrated six books from 1966 to 1998, including Pick A Peck of Puzzles, A Comick Book of Sports, A Comick Book of Pets and Poor Arnold's Almanac, the complete syndicated series of a newspaper comic strip he produced 1959-61 and again 1989-90. He also illustrated books by George Plimpton and William F. Buckley Jr. and created dust jackets for the John Updike books Bech at Bay, Bech is Back and Bech: A Book.

 

In the late 1950s, Roth’s cartoons began appearing in Playboy, which published 10 multi-page installments of his “An Illustrated History of Sex” series in the late 1970s. He was a regular contributor of cartoon features to Punch from the late 1960s until the end of the 1980s, and had multi-page features in almost every one of the first 25 issues of National Lampoon (1970-1972), until his last satirized the editors of the magazine. Roth also did a stint as an editorial cartoonist and won the Reuben Award at the National Cartoonists Society, of which he was president 1983-85. He’s been recognized previously by the Society of Illustrators with numerous Silver and Gold Stars. Roth’s solo exhibition “Free Lance, A Fifty Year Retrospective” traveled to Philadelphia, Columbus, San Francisco, New York City, London and Basel, Switzerland, 2001–2004, appearing in print in a Fantagraphics book with the same title (and an introduction by Yrs Trly).