Beware: Book Covers Ahead! Part 2
During the early 1960s, there was a dramatic sea change in the creative scene in London, the bright young things were taking over. Virtually every area of creativity was making waves: Mary Quant and Barbara Hulanicki in fashion, Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton in modelling, David Bailey and Terence Donovan in photography, David Hockney and Bridget Riley in painting, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in music, Lindsay Anderson and John Schlesinger in film, Albert Finney and Julie Christie in acting, and Harold Pinter and John Osborne in theatre.
Town magazine, art directed by Tom Wolsey. All conspired to help create the term ‘London, The Swinging City', coined by Time magazine in 1966. For the first time, weekend colour supplements dropped onto our doormats, and Town magazine, under Tom Wolsey’s art directorship, was making waves. At long last, Britain seemed to be surfacing from the gloomy, rationed, post-war years of the 1950s.
Many young graphic designers were hatching out from the various design and art schools. They moved into advertising, television and film, with some setting up their own small design groups and others even forming pop groups. In graphics, most were echoing the work they had been inspired by from America and Switzerland. Clean graphics and modernist typography were displacing the well-trodden English polite approach to design that hadn’t much changed in the previous four decades, and the term ‘graphic designer’ was beginning to replace the more commonly used ‘commercial artist’. Fletcher/Forbes/Gill opened their studio, as did Derek Birdsall with BDMW Associates. A new order was being established.
In 1962, the US film To Kill a Mockingbird was released. The opening title sequence was to have a big impact on graphic designers. It was designed and directed by Stephen Frankfurt using inanimate objects shot with macro lenses. To my mind, to this very day, it remains one of the most beautiful and timeless pieces of work ever produced.
The above three covers are by Raymond Hawkey form 1963 and 1964. The Ipcress File (left) In particular, was loathed by the publishers, but Deighton dug his heels in and went against the sales department. It was an enormous success and spawned many imitations. The cover on the right is by Larry Carter in 1963 for Macmillan, and below four of Derek Birdsall’s covers in collaboration with photographer Harry Peccinotti for the Penguin Somerset Maugham series in the 1970s.
In 1960, Tony Godwin joined Penguin as an editor. He formerly ran Better Books, and the City Bookshop. Because of this, he had a coalface view of selling to the public. His view of cover design differed from that of Penguin’s founder, Sir Allen Lane. Within a year, Godwin had hired Germano Facetti, a sophisticated young Italian, to oversee the design of their covers. He was gifted with an inspired knowledge of art and photographic history, something he would put to good use. Facetti’s impact on Penguin was to revolutionise the look of crime fiction covers. He commissioned Romek Marber to create a new ‘house style’ (the term ‘brand’ hadn’t yet entered the vernacular) to replace the long-standing vertical green bar styling created by Jan Tschichold, introduced back in 1951.
Romek Marber came up with a uniform typographic structure that occupied the top quarter of the cover, leaving the remaining three-quarters free for an image. It was a simple idea, but a brilliant one. The system brought order and instant recognition to Penguin’s growing list, while giving designers and illustrators plenty of room to make their mark. More importantly, it gave Penguin a distinctive modernist personality that perfectly matched the spirit of the 1960s and helped transform the look of British publishing.
Germano Facetti had a supreme knowledge of art history, and the ability to know just the right image to grace the covers of Penguin Classics. I remember my old business partner Ken Carroll, who had assisted Facetti for a short while in the 1960s, having Facetti insist that Ken crop ever closer into an image to give it a “cinematic quality”. He was right of course.
Facetti attracted the very best emerging designers and illustrators around to produce a design for a fee of £30 (around £900 today). He had no shortage of takers, including Peter Blake, Alan Fletcher, Derek Birdsall, David Gentleman, Mel Calman, Paul Hogarth, George Mayhew, Larry Carter, Quentin Blake and André François. In fact, virtually anyone he wanted. The introduction of Marber’s distinctive cover styling was again leading the way in cover design, reflecting the literary cachet that Penguin had – it was a publisher you could trust and one that cared about the look and production of its books, with an institutional mission akin to Lord Reith’s BBC.
In a masterstroke, Germano Facetti commissioned David Gentleman to design and wood-engrave the covers for the Penguin Shakespeare series.
All was running smoothly and ever upwards until Penguin became a public company in 1961. It expanded and many new people came in to help run it. Allen Lane continued as managing director but slowly became disenchanted with how the company was changing.
Tony Godwin eventually took on the mantle of Penguin’s chief editor. At this time, he felt that Facetti’s stark two-colour-line cover house style was too restrictive and sophisticated. In 1965, he hired the up-and-coming designer/illustrator Alan Aldridge, who had, in fact, not only been commissioned by Facetti a few times but was also his friend. Godwin made Aldridge fiction art director and, over Facetti’s head, hatched a plot with Aldridge to change the carefully orchestrated covers art directed by Facetti. Now in a cosseted position under the protection of Godwin, Aldridge immediately dispensed with Marber’s grid, liberating the whole cover and, importantly for him, showing off his talent. Street-smart Aldridge was beginning to make a reputation and Penguin, for him, was an opportunity to shine.
In this new position, Aldridge was very cavalier in his approach: everything was up for grabs on the little rectangle canvas, even the Penguin logo appeared haphazardly in different sizes. In a very short space of time, all of the work so painstakingly instigated by Facetti had disappeared. But within two years Tony Godwin would run into a brick wall in the shape of Penguins founder Sir Allen Lane.
Allen Lane became increasingly unhappy with Tony Godwin and was horrified when in 1967 he published the English edition of French cartoonist Siné’s periodical ‘Massacre’. It contained anti-clerical cartoons, and many bookstores refused to stock it. Lane became so enraged that in the dead of night, had all remaining copies Massacre burned. In a subsequent disagreement with Godwin, Lane fired him.
Meanwhile Aldridge’s star was rising and his work was being featured everywhere, and The Beatles were rather taken with his wild, colourful, psychedelic imaginings. Needless to say with Aldridge’s major ally gone he didn’t stay long after that: he was now a sought-after image maker and left to join the glitterati, spending quite a lot of his time painting on young, naked female bodies, as was the norm in those LSD-fuelled years. Germano Facetti continued at Penguin, working on non-fiction and classic fiction covers. But the damage to Penguin’s image had been done. Apparently Facetti never spoke to Aldridge again.
From the mid-1950s, Push Pin Studio published The Push Pin Graphic. It was filled with exuberant experimental work that blew everyone's minds in the UK when their travelling exhibition was shown in central London in the late1960s. It was like a big top circus had come to town. It triggered a major change to the British design scene, mostly concentrated in London back then. It had a great impact on me, and loosened the stranglehold that Muller-Brockman held over me.
Push Pin Studios was simply streets ahead. And Alan Aldridge was clearly influenced by them and the great Twen magazine art directed by Willy Fleckhaus and his main illustrator Heinz Edelmann.
Simultaneously, in the 1960s another great influence for so many young graphic designers and illustrators. We clamoured to get our monthly copy of Twen even though it was expensive and all in German. Its most regular contributor was the illustrator Heinz Edelmann, who would go on to create the Beatles film, Yellow Submarine. Twen ran from the late 1950s to 1970, becoming ever more adventurous under its brilliant Art Director Willy Fleckhaus, who was also a prolific cover designer. Twen had a major influence on both Town and Nova magazines.
Willy Fleckhaus' rainbow colour series (top right), and much copied, was published by Edition Suhrkamp, in 1963. Above are two more of Willy Fleckhaus' book covers from the 60s. And as art director of Twen magazine, he made it constantly inventive and graphically fabulous.
At the same time, a less flamboyant group of American cover designers were producing highly individual work, much of which would go on to become classic. Featured here are two covers by Ivan Chermayeff, followed by work from Muriel Cooper, Rudolph de Harak, Tony Palladino, Paul Rand and Roy Kuhlman.
What united many of these designers was not a common style but a determination to find their own visual voice. Some were driven by ideas and conceptual thinking, while others relied more on a distinctive personal style or graphic fingerprint. Together they demonstrated just how many different ways there were to solve the same problem, giving American book design a richness and diversity that remains influential today.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, however, few designers in the UK would have seen any of this work unless they bought expensive American design annuals or attended one of the better art and design colleges with a substantial reference library. For most of us, such glimpses of the wider design world were rare and treasured discoveries. How different it is today, when we can see what is happening on the other side of the globe in seconds at the click of a button.
Suddenly, the Swiss discipline was out, as were the fashions of the time. Hey presto: skirts got shorter, bras were dispensed with, men grew Zapata moustaches and shoulder-length hair, and floral shirts and flares became sartorial must-haves. The late 1960s and early ’70s went psychedelic. Move over Helvetica; hello Art Nouveau and Art Deco – love and peace are all around you.
Nicholas Thirkell, art director of Macmillan Publishers in the 60s and 70s, and I, who at the same period was art director of William Heinemann, became friendly rivals, always trying to trump each other in producing the best hardback covers. He went on to set up NTA studio with another talented bunch of creative talent. More of which in part 3.
For those of us in the publishing industry during the late 1960s and 1970s, Penguin was always the publisher to watch for innovative work on covers. But after the hiatus created by Godwin and Aldridge, things at Penguin became a little directionless. Without an art director, it caused them some grief with the direction of their cover presentation; after a year, they found what would become the perfect candidate, David Pelham. Both he and his work were a perfect fit to get things creatively back on track for Penguin. He came from a background in magazines: Studio International and Harper’s Bazaar. He was not only cultured but a highly creative talent in his own right, as he would demonstrate during his 11-year stint at Penguin. Above is just a small sampling of David Pelham's own work.
One of David Pelham’s early commissions after joining Penguin in 1968 was the Shakespeare series. During Germano Facetti’s tenure, the covers had been beautiful wood cut illustrations by David Gentleman, a hard act to follow.
Undaunted, Pelham turned to the wonderful illustrator Paul Hogarth, whose work complemented Gentleman’s in an entirely different way. The collaboration proved a lasting one, with Hogarth continuing to illustrate for Pelham for well over a decade.
There is no doubt that Derek Birdsall enjoyed a long and important relationship with Penguin Books. He was admired by both Germano Facetti and David Pelham and, over many years, contributed to some of the publisher's most memorable cover programmes.
Working under the name of his design company, Omnific, Derek created the distinctive cover styling for the original Pelican Education series. The system was deceptively simple, providing a strong and consistent framework while allowing each title its own character. To achieve this, Derek commissioned around thirty designers and illustrators to create images that worked within his carefully considered formula. Among them was Michael Foreman and, as shown earlier, Harry Peccinotti, whose photography brought a striking visual presence to the Penguin Somerset Maugham series.
What distinguished Derek's work was his ability to combine rigorous structure with conceptual clarity. He understood that a book cover had to do more than attract attention; it had to communicate an idea. That balance of discipline and imagination became a hallmark of his work and helped shape the visual identity of Penguin during one of its most influential periods.
David Pelham was a remarkable talent spotter. Shown above is just a fraction of the exceptional work he commissioned during his years at Penguin.
Among those he championed was John McConnell, who would later go on to revolutionise the look of Faber & Faber during his time there.
There will be more on John McConnell’s highly individual way of creating a brand for a publishing house and the extraordinary stable of talent he injected into his transition of Faber & Faber in part 3 of Beware: Book Covers Ahead!
The cover, designed and illustrated by John Gorham (l above left) sends up the age-old approach to 'selly' covers in a delightful and witty way. But in an ironic twist of fate, David Pelham actually found himself having to produce that very thing, minus the delight. The cover shown (right) was the result. Being in the publishing industry at the time, I knew the writing was on the wall. I couldn't see how David Pelham would endure having to produce this kind of thing for long.
Peter was there to turn the company around and sell more ‘units’, as books came to be known. Mayer had a liking for the unsophisticated and downright obvious clichéd covers. Pelham initially went along with this, but his heart clearly wasn’t in it and, in 1979, left. It was a sad loss. Blockbusters started to be included on the list and, over a short period, Penguin’s essence, which had always been made visible by caring designers like Jan Tschichold, Hans Schmoller, Tony Richardson, Germano Facetti, Romek Marber and David Pelham, ebbed away. Along with many staff cuts in a major restructuring of Penguin, which eventually led to a healthy profit, but sadly a loss of their visual cachet.
There is one long-serving Penguin stalwart I must mention here, and that's Gerald Cinamon, whose connection with Penguin began in 1961 when, looking for freelance work, he was commissioned by Puffin Books editor Kay Webb to work on the interior layouts of a number of titles in those analogue, Cow Gum days.
In 1963 Gerald began receiving freelance work from Penguin's recently arrived Art Director, Germano Facetti. The commissions steadily increased and, alongside typographic layouts for the interiors, Gerald was also entrusted with designing non-fiction covers using imagery sourced by Facetti.
A year later, Tony Richardson joined Penguin as Art Editor, and Gerald had enormous respect for both the man and his approach to design. Eventually Gerald joined Penguin full-time, with responsibility for many of the non-fiction areas, including the prodigious Pelican imprint, covering subjects such as art history, architecture and the social sciences. He also worked on Penguin Poetry.
Over the years Gerald witnessed a remarkable procession of talented people come and go, some willingly, others less so. Facetti, Richardson, Pelham and many others passed through the Penguin doors, each leaving their mark on the company. Yet Gerald remained a reassuring constant, quietly helping to shape the look of Penguin's non-fiction publishing through some of its most distinguished years.
Then came the digital revolution. For some it opened exciting new possibilities, but for others it marked the end of an era. Gerald had grown up in a world of hot metal, drawing boards, Cow Gum and typographic craft, and in 1985, after a remarkable twenty-four-year association with Penguin, he finally took his leave, just before the digital tide began to wash away much of the world he had known.
While revisiting this original blog post from 2011, I realised there was very little evidence of my own years in publishing, whether through modesty, oversight, or perhaps a reluctance to look back.
To put that right, I’ve included above examples from my freelance work in the early 1960s, followed by my five years as Art Director at William Heinemann in the late 1960s. The five years I spent as Art Director at Fontana Books during the 1970s that will be posted in part 3 of this series.
All in all I was involved in creating thousands of book covers as art director, designer, illustrator, and, on the odd occasion, author. It may help explain my enduring enthusiasm for cover design, a fascination that has remained undiminished for more than sixty years.
Above: Covers from my freelance days in the very early 1960s, a time when I would often design, illustrate and photograph a book myself, as fees were so modest back then.
Below: Covers produced during my time as Art Director at William Heinemann, a period that became my art school, my university and much more besides. It was there that I learned the craft of publishing from the inside and began to understand the remarkable relationship between words, images and ideas.
I have to admit that, at this stage in my story of the book cover, there is a tendency to lean rather heavily towards Penguin Books. But for many of us who worked in publishing, and that includes my own decade as an art director in both hardback and paperback houses, Penguin was always something special. Sadly, not quite so much today.
Back in the 1960s and 70s, however, there was plenty of good work being produced elsewhere. As some of the examples shown above demonstrate, amidst the heavy commercial blockbusters there were still thoughtful and imaginative covers seeing the light of day.
I particularly admired the work of the rarely-mentioned John Piper, art director of Corgi Books in the early 1960s. His cover for J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man is a small masterpiece. Donleavy insisted on typographic covers only, and Piper responded with the little gem shown here, which was featured in the very first D&AD Annual.
Alongside Piper, art directors such as Steven Abis at Panther and Paladin Books, and David Larkin at Pan and Picador, were also producing work of a consistently high standard.
Left: was designed by Nicholas Thirkell for Macmillan in 1967. For which he enlarged a train ticket for the jacket, with a die-cut punched hole, allowing the author and title to be seen on the binding case. 59 years later it’s still brilliant. And on the right: it was by the long-forgotten ex-Royal College of Art design group Churchill/Holmes/Kitley, for William Heinemann in 1965. The red lips image was a plastic lenticular with the mouth provocatively opening and closing depending on which way you looked at it. They were attached to each jacket. Unlikely that a publisher would do it today.
____________________________________________________________________________________
You can see individual posts on the work of Bentley/Farrell/Burnett, John Gorham, Tony Meeuwissen, Raymond Hawkey, Alan Fletcher, and Mike Dempsey by going to Topics on the left and clicking Designers.
Copyright © Mike Dempsey 2026.
IN PART 3 NEXT MONTH
In part 3: We move on into the 1980s, and feature John McConnell's striking facelift of Faber & Faber. The arrival of the digital disruptor, a new breed of illustrators and looking across the pond to view the US publishing scene.
0 comments