I was at a customer’s house Sunday night delivering a pizza when I say this print, framed, on their wall. The woman had invited me in and left me in the foyer with her big evil satanic dog while she went for her checkbook. I noticed this on the wall and began to slowly realize that it was a painting of the cast of characters of my favorite John Irving book, The Hotel New Hampshire. This was confirmed to me when the woman returned with the money, who seem rather pleased that someone knew what it was. (I got the feeling a lot of her upper-middle-class friends had no idea what it was supposed to be, and she wasn’t sure if it was a good thing the pizza guy did).

It took several minutes that night, using “The Google”, to find a representation of it on the internet. It’s the work of an artist named Robert Maguire, who did a lot of cover-art for paperback novels from the fifties into the eighties. This was from the 1982 release of the book.