Dirk Zimmer

About Dirk Zimmer

Dirk Zimmer (2 October 1943 to 26 September 2008) was a German-born illustrator who worked in New York State, best known for the pictures in Alvin Schwartz's I Can Read book In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories (1984) and Joanna Cole's Bony-Legs (1983).

Zimmer was born in Goslar, Lower Saxony, and grew up mainly in Hamburg, where he studied at the University of Fine Arts from 1963 to 1968. Working as "Dizi", he painted in the German avant-garde scene and then made films. In 1977 he moved to New York City, drawing for Crawdaddy, The New York Times and New York magazine, and began illustrating children's books, first with Larry Bograd: Felix in the Attic (1978), which won the Bank Street College of Education's Irma Simonton Schwarz Award as named by Wikipedia, and Egon (1980). He later lived in Barrytown and then Tivoli, New York.

Between 1978 and 2004 he illustrated more than 30 children's books, among them William H. Hooks's Mean Jake and the Devils (1981), the Perrywinkle books with Ross Martin Madsen, and his only book as author, The Trick-or-Treat Trap (Harper & Row, 1982). He also contributed to the anthology The Big Book for Peace (1990). His humour has been described as offbeat and sometimes grotesque but always gentle. He died in Poughkeepsie after being hit by a car in Tivoli.

For collectors

The 1984 I Can Read first edition of In a Dark, Dark Room carries Zimmer's art; the 2017 reissue replaced it with new pictures by Victor Rivas, so only earlier copies have his illustrations.