For many years Ross MacDonald has been a contributor to periodicals like Air Mail, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Time, and Rolling Stone, creating illustrations and writing humor pieces.

He also wrote and illustrated 4 children’s books, as well as the adult humor books What Would Jesus Craft?, and In and Out with Dick and Jane, (with co-author James Victore).

His illustrations have won many awards — including a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators — and are in the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

Yet all the while he has led a secret double life designing and fabricating props for over 150 movies, television series and Broadway plays. He has made everything from the FBI file seen in Oppenheimer, the book about the Osage that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character reads in Killers of the Flower Moon, the book Bradley Cooper’s character throws out the window in Silver Linings Playbook, the book that John Wick uses to kill an assassin, to the titular Book of Secrets for the second National Treasure movie; Jennifer Lawrence’s mop patents for Joy; baby’s favorite book in Baby’s Day Out; Nucky Thompson’s passport and Arnold Rothstein’s calling card for Boardwalk Empire; the morgue toe-tags in The Knick; the Pawnee town charter for Parks and Recreation; the Red Apple Tobacco tin in Tarantino’s Hateful Eight; Versace’s book in American Crime Story and thousands of other props.

Born and raised in the backwoods of Canada, he lived for many years in New York City before finally washing up on the bucolic shores of Connecticut.

photos: Deborah Feingold