Easter Puck

A red devil's face grins out from a stand of white Easter lilies, horns and slit eyes barely hidden among the blooms. Gordon Ross draws the flowers as a flat decorative screen, green stalks and pale trumpets filling the frame, with the red intruder the only warm note. A single diagonal slash of red crosses the upper corner. easter Puck is lettered above in an ornate outlined face. The idea is pure Puck: the serpent in the garden, temptation lurking inside the season's most innocent symbol. Ross, a Scottish-born illustrator who worked long for the magazine, keeps the design poster-flat and lets the joke land through color alone. On a holiday cover this spare, the menace reads as wit rather than warning.