The Diaries of Jon Arfstrom,
Anoka Historical Society,
Anoka, Minnesota
Jon Arfstrom (1928-2015) was born in Superior, Wisconsin and spent most of his childhood in Duluth, Minnesota.
As a teenager, Arfstrom attended the Minneapolis School of Art and began working as an illustrator at the Gamble-Skogmo Company and at the Lakeland Color Press. In the late 1940’s, he began selling cover art and illustrations to pulp magazines such as The Fanscient, Fantasy Advertiser, Mystic Magazine, Other Worlds Science Stories, Spaceway, Odyssey, Scientifantasy, and Space Trails, and in 1952, the prominent sci-fi/fantasy fanzine Weird Tales hired him to create some of their distinctive covers and interior illustrations. While Arfstrom worked for over 40 years as a staff illustrator for Brown & Bigelow in Minneapolis, he is most famous for his imaginative work for the sci-fi/fantasy world. In 1994, he received the prestigious Stoker Award for “Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection” for his illustration of Robert Bloch’s The Early Fears (Fedogan & Bremer).
In a 1983 interview, Arfstrom said, “Whether my art is called surrealistic, metaphysical or poetic, the essence of it is to search the imagination, to delve into the subconscious, to reach deep into hidden recesses of that psychological world that is our heritage…” This is borne out by the astonishing range of drawings and paintings contained in his diaries, which were donated to the Anoka County Historical Society after Arfstrom’s death in 2015.
ARCH3, LLC performed high-resolution digital capture of 2,307 pages in 31 diaries (penned between 1975 and 2015) for the Anoka County Historical Society in compliance with the standards of the Minnesota Historical Society’s Digital Imaging for the Small Organization.
Images of Arfstrom’s diary pages and additional related work curated by the Anoka County Historical Society can be viewed here.
