November 2019

4. Thinkin’ Lincoln

“My brain remembers things that aren’t important.” —Lincoln Peirce

By Brian Daly

When Lincoln Peirce (pronounced “purse”) lived in Brooklyn from 1985 to 1992, he listened to old-timey country music on WKCR, the Columbia University radio station. One day he heard a song he liked called “Don’t Fix Up the Doghouse,” but, to his disappointment, he didn’t hear who sang it. Ten years later—but still before the Internet made solving this kind of mystery easy—he heard that voice a second time singing another song, and he had his answer. George McCormick.

Who?

He’s a singer familiar to listeners of “South By Southwest,” a radio program devoted to honky-tonk, western swing, and straight-ahead country music recorded prior to 1975. Lincoln has hosted the show for twenty years every Monday morning on WMPG 90.9, the University of Southern Maine’s community radio station.

Wait. Did he recognize the voice after ten years?

“I have a good memory for music,” says Lincoln, 56. “My brain remembers things that aren’t important.”

But this Colby College grad remembers things that are important, too, including what it was like to be a kid growing up in Durham, New Hampshire. Those memories serve him well in his career as the creator of Big Nate, the popular comic strip about the misadventures of Nate Wright, a sixth-grader who’s a record-setter—for getting the most detentions. “People ask me all the time how I get my ideas, and my answer is boring: I sit down and think them up.”

Lincoln also drew the eight popular Big Nate books, aimed at middle-grade readers. These hybrids of text and pictures held down a top ten slot on the New York Times bestseller list for over 140 weeks. Sales of the series plus compilations have topped 18 million books.

Now, Lincoln is working on book two of a three-book series featuring the funny adventures of Max and the Midknights. Max is an apprentice troubadour in medieval times who wants to grow up to be a knight. These books are hybrids, too. As always, Lincoln does the design and layout by hand. When his editor at Crown Books for Young Readers calls for changes, Lincoln makes them the old-fashioned way. “I enjoy trying to fit the words and pictures together. It appeals to the puzzle solver in me.”

With the thousand-plus pictures he has to draw for each Max and the Midknights book—not to mention the 25,000 words he has to write—Lincoln is a prime candidate for a digital device that would allow him to alter the size and placement of pictures and text simultaneously.  He hasn’t found one, though, so he continues to work the old-fashioned way. Actually, he hasn’t looked very hard. “My system is inefficient,” he says, “but I work on deadline, and I worry about the time spent learning how to use technology. It isn’t at all intuitive for me. I haven’t been able to make the jump. If I did, though, I wouldn’t have to stay up until one in the morning.”

The room where he does this painstaking work is on the first floor of the colonial home he shares with his wife Jessica Gandolf, an acclaimed painter, in the Deering Highlands neighborhood of Portland. It’s filled with about 1,200 CDs shelved alphabetically, sports memorabilia, and pictures of their son Elias and daughter Dana. Tucked behind some books over in the corner is the blue ribbon Lincoln won for his apple pie at the Cumberland Fair in 2004. It was the only time he ever entered.

“I retired undefeated.”