Robert McGinnis was born in 1926. He grew up in Wyoming, Ohio and studied art at Ohio State University and the Central Academy of Commercial Art in Cincinnati. He has done advertising work, book and magazine illustration, gallery art and movie posters (among them, many of the James Bond films). The first of his nearly eleven hundred paperback covers appeared in 1958. His home and studio are in Old Greenwich, Connecticut.

Art Scott is a scholar and critic in the mystery field and has been involved with the world of vintage paperback collecting for thirty years, with a particular interest in paperback cover art. He began working on assembling a complete collection of Robert McGinnis's paperbacks in the early 1970's. He lives in Livermore, California.

Dr. Wallace Maynard was a neighbor and has been a long-time friend of Robert McGinnis since the late 1950's. He began compiling a checklist of McGinnis's work in 1980. His access to the artist and his meticulous archiving of McGinnis's work records made a definitive worklist possible. He lives in Cary, North Carolina.

Richard S. Prather is one of the giants of the paperback mystery field. Beginning with The Case of the Vanishing Beauty in 1950, his 40-odd novels featuring the cheerfully hardboiled private eye, Shell Scott, have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. McGinnis did a set of stunning covers for Prather's novels in the early 1970's.