Rafael Palacios (artist)
Rafael D. Palacios (1905–1993) was a Puerto Rican–American freelance artist and illustrator who specialized in book jackets and maps for major U.S. publishers in the mid-20th century. He is known for maps in many history books, including works by Isaac Asimov and Bruce Catton. Palacios was born in Santo Domingo to Spanish-Puerto Rican parents, and moved to Puerto Rico as an infant. Largely self-taught as an artist, he produced his first fine art sketches in 1928 in San Juan and developed a specialty in Afro-Caribbean portraiture. He moved to New York City in the 1930s and returned to Puerto Rico around 1980.
In 1937 he represented Puerto Rico at an Exhibition of American Art in New York, and in 1938 he had a one-man show of Afro-Antillean gouaches at Delphic Studios in New York. He also exhibited in New York and San Juan, and began working for American newspapers as an illustrator and translator of comic strips. In the mid-1940s he shared a studio with other freelance artists and designed covers and endpapers for Bantam Books, with endpapers that had a strong cartographic feel similar to Dell Maps. In 1948 he drew the maps for Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe, and later provided maps for his memoirs Mandate for Change and Waging Peace.
From the late 1940s to the early 1990s Palacios produced thousands of maps for hundreds of books, many for Doubleday. He specialized in endpaper maps and military history, especially World War II and the Civil War. He took over the Rivers of America map work in 1956, and the last 13 books in that series (1956–74) feature his maps. He created maps for works by many famous people, including Lyndon Johnson, Winston Churchill, Herman Wouk, Leon Uris, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Dean Acheson, Omar Bradley, Dee Brown, John Dos Passos, and John Toland. Palacios favored freehand lines and hand-lettered labels, avoiding mechanical lettering. His papers and original maps are housed in the Library of Congress.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 08:20 (CET).