Part 1
A few years ago I read a piece in The Guardian by Danuta Kean on book cover design and was struck by this quote from Jason Arthur, a publishing director at Penguin Random House:
“I used to think British book design was the best in the world and that the Americans were 20 years behind... But that has changed in the last two or three years, especially with fiction from the US that put our designs to shame.”
As anyone who has followed this blog over the years will know, I have more than a passing interest in book covers. It might be a little too much for some. My fascination goes back to my teens and later became the source of freelance work for many of London's independent publishers during the 1960s. From 1968, I spent a wonderful decade in publishing, first as Art Director at William Heinemann and later at William Collins (Fontana Books).
Fast-forward sixty years and I still find it difficult to pass a bookshop without being magnetically drawn inside. It is a world that has always fascinated me, and one where many great designers and illustrators cut their creative teeth. It was, and probably still is, an area with little financial reward but a reasonable amount of creative freedom, provided there was an enlightened art editor or art director prepared to fight your corner.
"I've always loved a healthy debate on design. But I'd clearly crossed the line with this group..."
Why am I telling you all this? Because something rather odd happened in 2018.
For some time I had been commenting, mostly on Facebook, about what I felt was an increasing decline in the standards of British book cover design. My observations came from regular visits to bookshops, particularly Waterstones, where new titles are displayed face-up on tables. My main criticism centred on the growing similarity of many covers: oversized typography occupying three-quarters of the available space, often rendered in a deliberately naïve hand-drawn style.
My comments sparked a debate on Facebook that eventually migrated to the rather more combative world of Twitter, where various people, most of them unknown to me, began adding their views.
All fine by me, as I've always loved a healthy debate on design. But I'd clearly crossed the line with this group when I featured the cover of a recently purchased book and remarked: "Shame about the cover, another missed opportunity."
Little did I know that I had wandered into an encampment of what I assume were younger designers, who quickly informed me that I had criticised not merely a designer but, according to one respondent, "the greatest book cover designer in the world." High praise indeed.
What followed was a steady stream of criticism, sarcasm and the inevitable ageist jibes. Over the course of a week I was systematically dismantled for daring to question the work of a hero. Trying to explain my position within Twitter's character restrictions proved hopeless. I spent more time editing my responses than writing them. Eventually I apologised and withdrew, leaving them to continue the argument without me.
So here I am on my own turf, where I can explain more calmly, and hopefully more clearly, my views on the state of British book cover design and perhaps generate a broader and more balanced discussion than the one I encountered online.
As for the abuse, my youngest and wisest daughter offered a succinct verdict: "You probably deserved it."
She may be right. I leave that for you to decide.
Some Historical Background
The book cover, or more accurately the dust wrapper, began life as a means of protecting the highly decorated cloth bindings of the mid-nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century these wrappers had started to carry decorative designs of their own, becoming a form of advertising for the books they enclosed.
The First World War interrupted that development, but during the 1920s the wrapper evolved into the modern dust jacket and increasingly became the public face of the book. The decoration on the binding itself gradually receded while the jacket moved centre stage.
This new creative territory quickly attracted distinguished artists and designers. Styles of the day were reflected on these small paper canvases and an impressive list of contributors emerged, including Picasso, Matisse, Edward McKnight Kauffer, Stanley Morison, Barnett Freedman, Vanessa Bell and Taylor Lee-Elliott. Their names often appeared prominently on the jackets themselves.
Many people assume Jan Tschichold's wonderful King Penguin series, launched in 1939, was entirely original. In reality, its look and feel owed a considerable debt to the Insel-Bücherei series produced by the Leipzig publisher Insel Verlag from 1912 onwards.
As you can see, very little is truly new in the book cover design world.
The three landscape-format covers below, for Chatto & Windus's Zodiac imprint, feature repeat-pattern line illustrations designed by Enid Marx RDI in 1950.
Nicholas Thirkell beautifully re-energised the formula for the V&A Colour Books series in 1986, a project that won him a D&AD Gold Award and sparked of a wider use of the discipline.
This well-trodden approach has since become a standard formula for publishers looking to revitalise their backlists for the gift market.
Today the style has even migrated into luxury packaging and products such as Ridley's Games. If only Insel Verlag had thought to copyright the idea.
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As the book jacket evolved, publishers and authors began taking it more seriously. Some of the larger publishing houses even employed art editors. In post-war Britain, however, there were relatively few specialists in these roles. More often than not they were pipe-smoking, corduroy-jacketed editors who commissioned jackets in between editing manuscripts.
The resulting designs often possessed a handmade quality rooted in commercial art traditions that had changed little since the 1930s.
Typographical and hand-lettered covers were the staple diet of many publishers. At Faber & Faber, Berthold Wolpe RDI effectively established the house style. Meanwhile at The Bodley Head, Michael Harvey was producing equally distinctive work.
As with many things during this period, America was ahead of the game. Designers such as Alvin Lustig, Paul Rand, Bradbury Thompson and Saul Bass were already exerting a profound influence on younger British designers.
By the mid-1950s a number of young British designers had progressed from the Central School, where they had studied under the influential typographer Antony Froshaug, to postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art. What they found there was not what they had expected, and many became determined to change it.
Alan Fletcher's cover for Ark No.13 stripped away the prevailing Victorian revival style and replaced it with a cleaner, more modern sensibility, much to the horror of some RCA tutors.
His work was a revelation for me as teenager, looking for a creative path to follow. I consumed Brockmann’s book, hook, line and sinker, back then and still to this day adhere to many of his principles.
Britain was perfectly placed to blend these two approaches, combining American wit and energy with Swiss rigour and structure. The result was an extraordinary flowering of design that helped define the creative explosion later labelled "Swinging London" by Time magazine in 1966.
The other great influence came from Switzerland and designers such as Josef Müller-Brockmann and Max Huber, whose disciplined, highly structured modernism offered an entirely different model.
An earlier student who entered the Royal College of Art in 1948 was David Gentleman RDI. Unlike the generation that followed, Gentleman was perfectly happy under the guidance of Edward Bawden and Abram Games RDI.
The examples above show the influence of Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and the Victorian revival typography popular during the 1950s. Yet Gentleman evolved with the times and became one of the key figures in British modern design, transforming postage stamps, creating many memorable Penguin covers and a prolific illustrator.
It was published in 1964, a slim 148-page black-and-white paperback which featured twenty brilliant book covers. I bought my 18-shilling copy and was transfixed. It still sits on my bookshelf.
That annual, together with the collection of jackets I had somewhat “liberated” from my local library, propelled me into the world of book cover design and eventually into a decade working in publishing.
Sixty years later, my fascination with the subject remains undiminished. It is one of the most revealing areas of graphic design, reflecting every stylistic shift and cultural change. For all the modest fees involved, it also gave designers and illustrators something increasingly rare: room to experiment.
Four treasured covers from my "liberated" collection. From L to R: Keith Cunningham, 1962. And three covers by Jack Larkin, 1963-64. Larkin, sadly long dead, remains one of my personal design heroes.
PART 2: NEXT MONTH
In part 2: Swinging London / The transition of Penguin Books into a carefully orchestrated identity under the brilliant Germano Facetti, only to have it systematically decimated with the arrival of Alan Aldridge and much more.
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