Snodrog the pendant lived in a miserable excuse of a house – "made out of stolen bed slats" with shingles from "old schoolbook covers". He would sit in this miserable house all day long, covered from head to foot with chalk dust, working out logical problems (The Pedant and the Shuffly, 7).
Inside - "walls, ceilings, and floors" - were blackboards. The frontispiece image by Marilyn Fitschen gives the best view into the house - and indeed, mind - of Snodrog, where he's shown "working out logical problems" and covered in chalk dust.
Fitschen said while it is “very hard” remembering the illustrations she created decades ago since she didn’t keep any notes, she does have some memories of this piece.
"The frontispiece was drawn last, after the other drawings were finished. Our editor at Macmillan, Betty Barthelme, asked for a title page and this was the result. John may not have seen this drawing until the book was printed, I'm not sure.[1]”
Included in the two-page image are:
- A bust with a rope suspended from its nose. The bust, Marilyn said, “was a convenient place to tie the clothesline which was probably drawn to give some movement to the page [1].”
- A chalkboard showing x=x and a dotted line in the shape of a circle whose ends result in an exclamation!
- A sunflower growing beside another chalk diagram.
- A framed photograph?
- A bottle (or two) of God-only knows!
- An hourglass.
- On the other side of the room are a compass and a globe on the table, the sphere covered in hardening wax from the tipped candle. What about the dagger sticking out of the globe? Anarchist imagery? Clumsy juggling?
- A toad studies a possible lack of reflection in a mirror: “I like to draw toads; ditto with sunflowers.”
- A rodent dangles from a wall-to-wall rope.
- Tattered rags carrying the names of the author and illustrator. “I suggested to [Barthelme] they install a typeface for the title and author, but she thought that my scribbles were more appropriate.”
- Is that a turtle smack in the middle of the floor, possibly off to the right of the fireplace, with a candle stuck out of its back?
- A rag doll? “I can't think of relating them to anything specific, except things that were around the house. We did have a turtle and a doll that looked like a little wizard (I was reading Tolkein at the time and was in the mood) [1].”
- Symbols - a radical, a Phi, and more - written in chalk. These figures on the blackboard were Marilyn's attempt at mathematical symbols: "I think I failed [1].”
- And then there’s Snodrog. Here he’s with the cliché bird on the shoulder and other wizardly icons that make this scene like others in Bellairs's writing: strange but strangely familiar.
Slats are a type of base for a bed frame, consisting of a series of connected bars lying across the width of the frame. Those in the picture above are in better condition than those making up Snodrog's house.
"I think John – and probably Dale and I – associated schoolbooks and blackboards with teachers from our parochial grade school days. John may have had some issues with teachers, particularly the pedant-like ones in academia [1].”
References
- [1] Correspondence with Marilyn Fitschen.
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