Vale Stephen Biesty: Cross-Section King

Celebrating one of the masters of visual explanation

Apr 17, 2025

r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn - Spanish Galleon, minus masts-sails, art by Stephen Biesty [1930x1100] — *Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-Sections, 1992*

A few months ago I had the fleeting thought to write a post about Stephen Biesty, the DK books cross-section legend. After learning he’d passed only just last year, I was disheartened to discover his personal website and galleries had gone offline, and there were no significant retrospectives of his career that I could find.

Now, after having looked through nearly every single work he produced and having read literally everything I could find online about him, I have come to find his quiet denouement rather touching. He certainly seemed to be private by design, offering only a handful of interviews in his lifetime. The longest profile I could find is weirdly condemning of his workmanlike ethos:

The artist himself is not quite as immediately engaging. Biesty is 35, with the smooth face and straight jeans of a Microsoft programmer. He lives in a Somerset cottage of grey-gold stone between a village church and a pair of wandering geese.
Biesty's garden glows in the late-summer sun, yet he leads the way straight up to his studio and questions about his business. The room is almost bare of artist's clutter, more an office with fax and easel and three paintbrushes laid parallel on a tissue to dry. ‘I don't collect stuff,’ says Biesty.
He talks about his illustrating with a stern set to his chin, as if filling out a tricky detail. He doesn't sketch - "There isn't time to be doing reams of doodles" - but expands his work straight from thumbnail ideas to full-scale final pieces. These he completes, eyes close to the paper and hand in rhythm, layer by repetitive layer, between 7.30am and 5.30pm every weekday. "At lunchtime I go downstairs for half an hour and a sandwich."
Biesty makes all this sound like mass production. "You're employed to do one thing," he says, straight as a factory manager. "Something that's going to sell." There are no posters of his pictures on his studio walls.
[…] Often, he answers with "we" rather than "I".

I have to confess a great soft spot for all this. My great grandfather was studying technical illustration at Pratt before he was drafted into the war and lost at sea. His daughter became a graphic designer, as did her daughter — my mom. I appreciate that we all sat somewhere between art and science, heart and mind. Biesty’s seeming indifference towards an artistic identity gives his work more credibility for my tastes.

Biesty’s breakout moment came when the K of DK books asked Biesty to draw a steamboat in cross section. “I tried it lengthways and he said, ‘Fine. But try it the other way, like a loaf.’” And lo:

r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn - Anatomy of an ocean liner [1900 x 764]

This became the centerpiece for his first book, Incredible Cross-Sections, and the seed for the rest of his career. Anyone around my age and above a certain threshold of autistic will have burned much library time on this amazing ‘90s run of DK books. Some personal favorites:

There were two nifty-looking software adaptations of his DK books:

*Stephen Biesty's Incredible Cross-Sections: Stowaway!*

I got this bonkers 3D foldout book that is one single 5-foot illustration:

Although Biesty’s style is so synonymous with the technical sensibility of diagrams, I doubt his work would’ve appealed and endured so well had he not also been such a humanist. He only did a handful of books prior to the cross-section era, but they’re equally remarkable and overflowing with life. Consider these gorgeous spreads from 1989’s Exploring the Past: Middle Ages:

The profile describes how Biesty’s tastes came through in his earliest assignments: “From here, though, Biesty did more than fulfil a brief. To his detailing he added the dirty stuff of life. Drinking and whoring sailors reeled through his book on HMS Victory. Bodies rotted in the moat of his Castle. Like his young readers, Biesty finds glee in grubbiness. He cites Hogarth and Hieronymus Bosch, then pulls out a fax from Richard Platt, who writes the text for his books, about a mite that lives in human eye-lashes. ‘We're going to have to include it in the next one,’ he says.”

Biesty regularly cites two key influences: the cutaway artists of the midcentury comic magazine Eagle, and the English painter Alan Sorrell.

r/RetroFuturism - The Flying Wing Jet Airliner of the Future, c.1950's

*Terribly romantic Eagle magazine spreads, Leslie Ashwell Wood*

The line of influence from Eagle is clear: the team of artists there, Leslie Ashwell Wood the most notable among them, were the pioneers of the form. I’d like to go just as deep with their work some day, and I had to cut myself off from poring over gigantic galleries just so I could finish this post.

I had never heard of Alan Sorrell but I was blown away by the intensity of his work, particularly for the context. Most of Sorrell’s paintings are historical recreations of important British sites commissioned for educating visiting tourists, yet many of them are incredibly forboding. “His drawings are very atmospheric with dark moody skies. You get an extremely powerful sense of place when you look at them,” says Biesty. A sense of place, sure, but you get to see where Biesty’s edgier side might come from. Here’s Biesty doing his riff own on Stonehenge:

*Explore the World of Man-Made Wonders, 1991*

I hadn’t encountered much of Biesty’s post-DK work prior to writing this post, but the man did not slow down after his early iconic run. Some gems from perusing these later books:

Later in life, Biesty was able to admit some of the depth so evident in the work, as he accepted an award in 2011 for Into the Unknown:

“In a world where most information is stored and conveyed electronically, conventional non-fiction books for young people have taken a heavy hit. So is Into The Unknown a dinosaur, a final example of a Dying Breed? I believe not. In the years ahead, certainly fewer paper books will be produced. But those that are designed, written, and manufactured will be a bit like medieval manuscripts — special creations, works of art, unique, beautiful products to be collected and cherished. Into the Unknown, therefore, is not the end of a line but the beginning of a new, fresh and very beautiful one, and you have so kindly recognized that fact. Thank you all very much indeed.”