Sal Murdocca

About Sal Murdocca

Sal Murdocca (born 26 April 1943) is an American illustrator from Brooklyn, New York, best known for drawing the pictures in Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Tree House chapter books.

Murdocca grew up in Brooklyn and majored in illustration at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. After graduating in 1960 he spent a year at the Art Students League of New York while apprenticed to a commercial art studio, then built a nine-year career illustrating for advertising and magazines before turning gradually to children's books. Since 1970 he has written ten books of his own and illustrated hundreds of educational, mass-market and trade titles. In the early 1980s he taught writing and illustration at Parsons School of Design for two years, and he wrote the libretto for an opera based on his picture book The Hero of Hamblett (1980).

His longest partnership began in 1992, when he started illustrating Magic Tree House; by 2014 he had drawn about 50 volumes of the series, plus about 30 nonfiction companion books from 2000. Other authors he has illustrated include Eve Bunting, Bill Martin Jr., Laura Numeroff, Edward Packard and Elizabeth Winthrop (Dancing Granny, 2003). He also paints in watercolour and acrylic and has shown work in Nyack and SoHo in New York, in Key West, Florida, and in France.

For collectors

Penguin Random House credits Murdocca with the art for the opening Magic Tree House titles, among them Dinosaurs Before Dark, The Knight at Dawn, Mummies in the Morning and Pirates Past Noon, so early copies of those books are the natural place to start. The series site now credits the illustrations jointly to Murdocca and A. G. Ford, and some later titles carry Ford's art, so check the credit in each copy.