Featured on PDR in the collection Through the Eye to the Heart: Bible Symbols (1908 edition)

Frank Beard (1842–1905) led many lives before designing hieroglyphic bibles. A successful political cartoonist by the age of seventeen, he drew one of the most widely reproduced Civil War satires, and was hailed as “the father of the American cartoon” by the Los Angeles Times in 1895. Deaf since childhood, he became a sought-after raconteur, famous for delivering “chalk talks”, lectures illustrated by rapidly drawn visuals. Touring the nation, his “sparkling, genial discourse about the mysteries of picture-making” — as a contemporary brochure described the act — entranced audiences almost as much as his lightning-quick pen. As he aged, politics gave way to an interest in religious education, and his belief in the transparency of visual communication led him to illustrate bibles in a pictographic…