Paul Frame

About Paul Frame

Paul Frame (4 May 1913 to 8 November 1994) was an American artist and book illustrator, born in Riderwood, Maryland, whose cover and interior art appears in the 1960s Whitman and Golden Press hardback editions of the Trixie Belden mystery series.

National authority records (the German National Library file, as shown by the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, and Wikidata) list him as an artist and give his birthplace and life dates. Open Library records a run of how-to-draw books under his name, with a 1913 birth year, including Drawing Dogs and Puppies (1978), Drawing Cats and Kittens (1979) and Drawing the Big Cats (1981). Beyond these records, public biographical detail is scarce.

A bookseller's listing of Trixie Belden editions credits him with the cover art for several of the first fifteen titles, and with the interior plates as well for some, including The Mystery Off Glen Road, The Mystery in Arizona, The Mystery at Bob-White Cave, The Mystery of the Blinking Eye, The Mystery on Cobbett's Island and The Mystery of the Emeralds. On The Gatehouse Mystery and The Mysterious Visitor he drew the cover while Marvin Besunder drew the interior, and on The Mystery on the Mississippi the interiors are credited to Harris Petie.

For collectors

For Trixie Belden collectors, Frame's work appears in the slightly larger illustrated hardback format used only for the first fifteen titles. The split between his covers and other artists' interiors varies from title to title, so check the credits in each copy. The same listing dates copies of this format between 1963 and 1969, so confirm the printing from the book itself.