This was an illustration I did for The Jewish Exponent back in the 80s. It was for an article on the incredible surge in the amount of printed information. It went on to detail the trials and tribulations of researchers who have to slog through the ever-growing pile of printed works.
Of course this was before the internet really caught on with everyone outside of research departments so I don’t know how hard the article’s author actually dug.
I was handed the article, and my job was to respond to it. At first, I was chasing down images of happy little Alpine climbers in the path of an avalanche of books. I wasn’t crazy about it and neither was the art director, but she did respond to sketches of a little guy in a dinghy being swamped by a tidal wave of information. That was the direction I was directed to go in so I proceeded directly to my drawing table and readied my weapons of choice at that time.
I worked on a sheet of 3-ply Strathmore Bristol and did this fairly large, needlessly complicated, painstaking drawing. Fortunately, the Exponent had photo-stat cameras that could accommodate works larger than most desktop scanners can today.