________________________________________________

During the early to mid-1990’s I had a particularly fluid and productive

correspondence with death row serial killer Lawrence “Pliers” Bittaker.

Throughout the creation of his clever series of hand- fashioned Pop-Up

and Pull-Tab greeting cards, Larry delegated the duties of making the

copies of key elements to yours truly. He would send his master sheets

with precise instructions as to what he wanted done and I would have

clean copies made on cardstock and mail him the prints. Then he’d

painstakingly cut, paste, hand color and embellish them with inkpen

details … ultimately, he’d assemble the pieces into various types of

novelty greeting cards featuring expertly hinged moving parts. The

work was exhaustive …when Bittaker grew weary of the enterprise,

I was left with many of Larry’s original art elements … it recently

occurred to me that, although Larry Bittaker letters and autographs

are quite common, his artwork is actually fairly rare and desirable.

This week I’ll be offering a slew of his original Pop-Up card related

artwork and master sheets. These sheets were meant to be “working

pieces” and not souvenirs, so they weren’t autographed by Larry, but

I will be including a hand signed letter in each package where Larry

makes a distinct reference to the style of greeting card featured in

he auction. Bittaker’s Pop-up card master sheets were always works-

refine the shape of the black lines. Some are mostly or entirely

hand drawn and others are Larry’s finalized printed copies with

small last minute hand-rendered flourishes. In my item descriptions,

I’ll specify how much original art

is present on each piece.