Case Study: Bob Eckstein
Occupation: Illustrator, Author
Gear: 20-inch Intel Core Duo iMac, 20-inch ViewSonic display, MacBook, 6x11 Wacom Intuos graphics tablet, external hard drives, AirPort Extreme, Adobe CS2, Corel Painter, iWork
Apple’s trademark industrial design—sleek lines, brushed aluminum, uncluttered and often buttonless surfaces—is almost the polar opposite of the workspace that writer and illustrator Bob Eckstein has created for himself. Still, Eckstein has always made his living with Macs.
"I was one of the first people, along with J.D. King [best known for designing the Absolut vodka print ads] and Michael Bartalos, to use the Macintosh as an illustration tool,” says Eckstein, an illustrator and author whose work has appeared in Fortune, The New York Times, Village Voice, Sports Illustrated, SPY, and GQ, among many others. “I used an early version of Painter, and my first Mac was an SE, around 1987."
Today, Eckstein uses a more up-to-date Mac setup, having added a 20-inch ViewSonic monitor to his 20-inch iMac for a dual-display rig, as well as a MacBook for when he travels—though you’d never recognize any of it if you stepped into the tiny attic workspace of his snug Adirondack-style cabin in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Eckstein made over his attic office—including his Mac rig—so he’d always feel like he was working in the belly of a 19th-century whaling ship.
That’s because Eckstein has completely transformed his Mac setup and home office in the style of a 19th-century whaling vessel, hiding his modern computer gear--iMac, scanners, printers and graphics tablet--behind custom-fitted vintage boxes and pieces of old wood that he found at auctions and flea markets.
“This whole thing began eight years ago, when I started work on the fictional diary of a man looking for the lost ship of Sir John Franklin,” Eckstein says. “In 1850, Franklin was looking for the passage to China and he got lost. England put up an amazing reward—an enormous amount of money—for anyone who could find evidence of Franklin’s ship. So all these people started making a mad scramble for this fortune without realizing what it was like to go up by the North Pole. At that time people thought that the closer you got to the North Pole, the closer you’d get to paradise and that temperatures would get more temperate. All these facts lend themselves to a comedy about Arctic exploration. So I started writing this diary.”
You'd never guess Eckstein's neat cabin conceals his boyhood dream come true in the attic.
Eckstein would like to publish the fictional diary (working title: The Sea Below Us) someday, but the Arctic enthusiast wrote his most recent book, The History of the Snowman (2007, Simon Spotlight), during the same period, drawing inspiration from his seaworthy surroundings.
Ever since he was a kid, Eckstein says, he has nurtured an abiding interest in Arctic history and exploration, which extended to the ships and other craft used by early explorers to reach and study the icy, far-flung region. He often fantasized about life at sea. Whenever he travels, he makes a point to visit maritime museums and tour old ships and submarines. He got a number of ideas for transforming his workspace to keep him inspired as he worked on The Sea Below Us and The History of the Snowman by spending time on a replica of one of the oldest preserved ships in the world, the Amsterdam, which was used in the 1590s by an explorer named Willem Barentsz, who tried to find China by sailing north of Russia.
Instead of a peephole, Eckstein installed a ship's porthole in his office door.
“I spent a couple of days on the Amsterdam taking photographs, making sketches, and studying it. Then I went out to San Diego for a week, where they have one of the oldest working ships in the world—the Star of India, which was built in 1863 and used for some of the scenes in Master and Commander. Every day I went on the ship and took notes and photographs, sketched, and wrote—it was there I started to get the idea of how I was going to turn my office into [a place where I’d feel like] I was still on the Star of India.”
Without knowing better, it’s easy to assume that Eckstein was inspired by the steampunk movement, in which dedicated craftspeople “retro-fit” computer gear with elaborate vintage materials and housings, turning working modern computer equipment into pieces that would be at home in a 19th-century aristocrat’s drawing room. But Eckstein says he only learned about steampunk after he had retrofitted his Mac setup with a hot-glue gun and rubber cement.
Like many flea-market junkies, Eckstein likes to crow about his finds, including the painting of the Hudson River Valley above his desk (25 cents) and the goggle-like spectacles ($2 at auction) to the left of a miniature globe (10 cents). The specs are a tribute to Thomas Dolby, who uses a similar image as his personal logo.
“After I posted pictures of my office on my blog, steampunk followers contacted me. Later I saw that Thomas Dolby began work on a similar recording studio, in a land-bound boat.”
Eckstein says he’d always been a fan of Thomas Dolby’s. “He was one of the first people to make music about history. He wrote songs about submarines and about the golden age of wireless, and that really attracted me. He was one of the pioneers of virtual reality—he was at the forefront of making holograms, and I was into that too, as an illustrator.”
One of Eckstein's cartoons, inspired by his Arctic fascination.
And then Eckstein’s worlds really collided: “I went to a concert which Dolby played in front of these old films—a lot of Arctic footage—and playing on musical equipment refitted into old submarine parts, and that was what inspired me.”
It took Eckstein about a month to make over the walls, floors, and ceiling of his attic—in some rooms he literally ripped out the ceiling and put in beams to replicate the feeling of a ship. “I also did this weird thing with acrylic paint and oil-based varnish—which you’re not supposed to do—but it gives that feeling of a an old, oily ship’s deck. The varnish beaded up the way it would on whaling ship decks in contact with whale blubber.”
Eckstein explains the difference between the steampunk aesthetic and the feeling he was after in his office: “The steampunk movement is more about romantic, Victorian sensibility and adding lavish detail to your computer. I am not about that. I’m about breaking it down to less technology. If steampunk is the fine French perfume of computer modification, then mine would be the stench of low tide. I really wanted a very basic, rudimentary, primitive look.”
"A secret button, when pushed, springs open the wooden panels" of this trapdoor, which leads to the stairs to Eckstein's attic office.
In making over parts of his home’s interior and modding his Mac, the author has fulfilled a childhood dream, which he says is its own reward—even if The Sea Below Us never gets published.
“It’s like having a bed in the shape of a sports car, or saying that one day you’re going to be an astronaut—I feel like a kid having my Mac office transformed into a ship workspace. Maybe deep down I really want to be a pirate,” Eckstein says—adding with a chuckle, “an iPirate.”
To learn more about Eckstein and his work, visit open.salon.com/blog/bob_eckstein or www.historyofthesnowman.com.
