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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

If you are of a certain age, you remember it well: The creepy, haunting, downright iconic—and totally weird—cover of the 1976 Dell edition of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.

But while many of us remember being scared by (and/or fascinated with) this image, there’s an unexpected mystery behind it: No one seems to know who the artist is.

Artist Michael Whelan posed the question to Twitter:

The blog post Whelan points to is by author S. Elizabeth, who has done an impressive amount of digging—everything from a simple reverse image search to reaching out to an assortment of sources. As she mentions, even the Internet Science Fiction Database does not have the answer—though it does note the mystery. Between Elizabeth’s queries and the commenters, it’s been determined that the image is not by Charles Lilly, The Brothers Hildebrandt, Boris Vallejo, Enric Torres-Prat, or Manuel Sanjulain.

Elizabeth tweeted the question at the Madeleine L’Engle Twitter account, which is run by the author’s granddaughter, but she didn’t know either:

She also started a conversation in the Unresolved Mysteries subreddit, resulting in a fascinating rabbit hole of suggestions.

We’ve started asking publishing colleagues and friends, but so far have no answers. But someone must know who created this armless centaur who haunted the dreams of an entire generation.


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Molly Templeton

Author

Molly Templeton has been a bookseller, an alt-weekly editor, and assistant managing editor of Tor.com, among other things. She now lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods.
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