Three more to add to the list of the fallen:
Robert Burchfield. Editor of "The New Fowler's", one of the most often consulted books on the shelf. Burchfield wielded a much smaller stick than the original Mr Fowler, and can be less entertaining for that, but he also tended to give more practical guidance, which, when you need to know how words work, and you need to know now, is rather attractive.
Saul Bass. This man did a job that would only have been possible since the middle of the last century: designing credit sequences for movies. If he is only remembered for the opening credits for "Age of Innocence", he will nevertheless be remembered for something much greater than anything most of us will ever do.
Syd Hoff. It's jarring to come across an obituary for someone you had assumed had died long ago. It seems to happen mostly with children's book illustrators, for some reason. Robert McCluskey ("Make Way For Ducklings" - has a better kids' book ever been made?) died a couple of years ago. Now Syd Hoff. Both produced books (and at least in the case of Hoff, New Yorker cartoons) in the 1940s and '50s that, visually at least, were of their time, so there is a tendency to carbon-date their creators accordingly. William Steig is the exception to this, mainly because he kept working well into his nineties, and his drawings, although they gradually became more minimal and shaky of line, continued to appear in the New Yorker with astonishing regularity right up to his death last year. Being the creator of "Shrek" no doubt helped him retain name recognition, even though the movie bears scant resemblance to the book on which it is based, a cause of some disappointment to at least one small child of my acquaintance.
