Burton Silver
Burton Silver is a cartoonist, parodist, writer, art critic and inventor. He lives in Wellington, New Zealand.
Life
Silver was born in Wellington and attended Wellington College, later completing a B.A. at Victoria University of Wellington in psychology and sociology. He worked initially as a boilermaker's assistant on Groote Eylandt, Northern Territory, Australia. After travelling in Asia he spent time in London, where he taught English.
His best-known cartoon series was written for the New Zealand Listener - Bogor, which dealt with a lone woodsman and the forest animals that were his only companions (especially a hedgehog). An earlier cartoon, OB (written under the pseudonym "Roux"), had as its main characters a bird, a snake, and a rock, and was initially inspired by Silver's time spent in the Australian outback. Bogor originally appeared in the Listener in 1973, and was New Zealand's longest-running published cartoon series.
He is also known for his humorous cat art books (created in collaboration with painter and photographer, Heather Busch): Why Cats Paint, Why Paint Cats, and Dancing with Cats, as well as his spoofs Kokigami: The Intimate Art of the Little Paper Costume (Japanese paper decoration for the genitals also in collaboration with Heather Busch), and the self-explanatory The Naughty Victorian Hand Book: The Rediscovered Art of Erotic Hand Manipulation (with illustrator Jeremy Bennett). Other books include What Bird Did That? A Driver's Guide to Some Common Birds of North America (co-authored with Peter Hansard), The Kama Sutra for Cats (illustrated by Margaret Woodhouse) and "Versability", a poetry game similar to Dictionary, where players create new lines for poems rather than new meanings for words (co-authored by his wife Melissa da Souza). His most successful book to date is Why Cats Paint which has sold over 700,000 copies worldwide. He has over one million books in print.
