A Novel Art - Fiction Cover Designs Part One

The other week I was having a browse through a couple of books from the art section in the library, one on John Minton and the other on Edward Bawden (The Snail That Climbed the Tower and Other Work by John Minton and Are You Sitting Comfortably: the Book Jackets of Edward Bawden, if you’re interested). Both were English artists of the inter and post-war period, and both earned a regular income through providing illustrations for book covers. As I leafed through, two immediately caught my attention. I recognised them from the fiction collections down in the stack. What other fiction still boasting covers designed by artists might also be found down there? I decided to have a good old delve. 

The John Minton cover is for John Wyllie's 1954 book Riot, a crime novel set in an unnamed West African country. Minton was influenced by the British neo-romantic artists of the pre-second world war years, in particular Michael Ayrton (of which more later). He gained renown as a portraitist, and later as an illustrator for posters (including an excellent one for the Ealing film The Titfield Thunderbolt) and for book covers. He illustrated Elizabeth David's classic cookbooks A Book of Mediterranean Cooking and French Cookery, as well as a series of travel books which also took him to the sunnier shores of Europe. Minton was well known in the bohemian milieu of Soho in the post-war years, where his dancing was legendary. He felt increasingly marginalised in this frequently vicious artistic demi-monde, however, and was sensitive to the dismissive criticisms of art world adjudicators who favoured abstract work and tormented expressionism which purportedly reflected the horrors of the contemporary world. Tragically, he took his own life in 1957. His work, and that of artists like him, is now being reassessed and brought back into the light. He is finally getting his due as a talented British artist possessed of a singular vision.

The Edward Bawden cover is for Elspeth Huxley's 1948 novel The Walled City. Huxley grew up in Kenya, then part of colonial British East Africa. Kenya in colonial and post-colonial times is the setting and subject for many of her novels, travel books and historical studies. The Walled City, however, is set in British colonial Nigeria in the post-first world war period. Bawden was an illustrator in the pre-war period who produced work in a wide range of illustrative and decorative fields. He designed posters and tiles for the underground, a mural for Morley College, London, wallpaper patterns, garden furniture and, of course, book covers. He was one of the artists who provided illustrations for the nascent line of Penguin paperbacks in the 1930s. Like his friend and fellow student at the Royal College of Art, Eric Ravilious (with whom he has often been compared), Bawden was an official war artist during the second world war. He travelled widely as a result, covering areas in North Africa, the Middle East and the East coast of America. He lived on after the war (unlike Ravilious) in the Essex villages of Great Bardfield (which boasted a significant artistic scene) and, from 1970 until his death in 1989, in Saffron Walden.

Another important artist of the inter and post-war years was John Piper. He was well known for his pen and watercolour studies of historical buildings and ruins. It was in such a capacity that he was employed as a war artist to record the bomb damage to churches, cathedrals and other historically and architecurally important buildings. This included Coventry Cathedral, which he visited the morning after the devastating blitz. After the war, he began designing stained glass windows. You can see some beautiful examples of his glass in St Andrews church in Plymouth. In terms of his work for book covers, he is a tantalising 'almost' amongst our stack fiction. The 1947 novel Forlorn Sunset by Michael Sadleir did have a Piper dust jacket, but alas it has disappeared somewhere during its history. However, the title page illustration remains, giving a hint of what it looked like. 

Denton Welch is another British artist from the inter and post war years who was associated with neo-Romantic movement. He was also a writer who produced a number of novels, an autobiographical memoir and a posthumously published poetry collection. He suffered serious injuries at the age of 20 when he was knocked off his bicycle by a car, which affected him profoundly throughout and led to his early death at the age of 33. Both his writing and painting have a fevered, hallucinatory quality which may be related to his constant state of pain. The writer William Burroughs cited him as a key influence, and the 'pope of trash' rates In Youth Is Pleasure as one of his favourite novels. Remarkably, a reading of it lives up to all the expectations that recommendation arouses. Welch illustrated his own books, and there are a number of examples down below.

The 1930 novel Drift was the first book by a working class Liverpudlian called James Hanley, and is about an Irish Catholic family in his home city. The cover is by artist and designer Enid Marx (and yes, she was a distant cousin of Karl) who was known to friends as Marco. She studied at the Royal College of Art alongside Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious, and like them was influenced by the example of Paul Nash, who taught there. Like Piper, she was commissioned during the war to paint studies of historic buildings at risk from bombing. She also wrote and illustrated and illustrated her own wartime children's books, Bulgy the Barrage Balloon and The Pidgeon Ace. She created a number of post-war Penguin covers and also some for Chatto and Windus. Marco's work also made its impact on thousands of people who would never been aware that that her art and design was a part of their lives. She created the pattern designs for the seating on London buses and tube trains, designed border patterns for everyday postage stamps and also created designs for the post-war utility furniture manufactured under government supervision whilst austerity conditions prevailed. As such, she played a significant part in providing the look of the era. 

The Hogarth Press was a small press set up by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1917, and initially using a handpress which they operated. It published regularly in the inter-war years, with titles mostly by or reflecting the preoccupations of the group of writers, artists and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Set. The designs were very much in the family, mostly produced by Virginia's sister Vanessa Bell. Duncan Grant, another of the Bloomsbury artists influenced by modern trends, and by the post-Impressionists in particular, also provided some of the cover designs. Those below are both by Vanessa Bell, though. They show the design sensibility which she brought to bear on her decorative work at the Omega Workshop and at her Sussex home at Charleston Farmhouse. 

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, published in 1956, was the second novel by Angus Wilson and remains his best known work. The cover is by Ronald Searle and reflects the book's satirical bent, whilst remaining less broadly comic than Searle's usual celebrated style. Searle was a prolific cartoonist from the post-war period onwards. His characterful caricatures, with their spindly limbs and ink-penned thatches of unruly hair, are instantly recognisable and were highly influential on subsequent generations, from Gerald Scarfe to John Lennon. He has earned immortality through his St Trinians and Molesworth cartoons, which perfectly capture the anarchy of childhood. He also left a valuable record, through the sketches he made as a prisoner of war, of the conditions of Japanese prisoner of war camps for those working on the Burma railway. 

Rosalind Wade was a writer whose career spanned 6 decades, from the 30s to the 80s. We have quite a number of her books down in the stacks, and we shall come across more later. Significantly missing from their number, however, is her first published novel, Children, Be Happy!, ironically titles. A too readily indentified use of real people as models for the schoolgirl characters resulted in a court case and a judicial order to destroy all copies of the book AND the original manuscript. Wade wrote novels which depicted the often conflicted inner lives of her characters, and she also produced a number of ghost stories throughout her life. As an editor of the journal Contemporary Review from 1970-1989, she encouraged a whole new generation of writers. Red Letter Day was her last book, published in 1980. The cover is by Felix Topolski, a Polish artist who moved to Britain in 1935. I remember him from the strangely low-key installation of his Topolski Century mural which was housed for many years in a railway arch studio by the South Bank in London. He too was a war artist, travelling with a British navy ship to Russia. He regularly worked for the BBC as well, providing backdrop sets and caricatures for the landmark interview series Face to Face.

Glenway Wescott was a Wisconsin-born writer who hung out with the Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway crowd in Paris in the 20s. It was probably there that he wrote some of the stories gathered in his 1929 collection Good-Bye Wisconsin. The cover is a striking piece of modernist art deco by Nottingham-born artist and designer Pat (or Patrick) Keely. He was best known for bringing a similarly arresting visual sensibility to posters for public transport and the GPO.

The Foxglove Saga is a 1960 novel by Auberon 'son of Evelyn' Waugh. The rather lovely cover is by Faith Jacques, a graduate of her hometown art college in Leicester. She was best known as an illustrator of children's books, including many published by Puffin. She produced the illustrations for the first UK edition of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as well as for books by the likes of Leon Garfield, Helen Creswell (Lizzie Dripping Again), Edith Nesbit (The Railway Children), Ursula Moray Williams, Allison Uttley and Nina Bawden (Carrie's War). In the late 70s and 80s, she began writing and illustrating her own children's books, including two about Tilly, a Dutch doll.

The novel The Corner That Held Them and the short story collection A Spirit Rises are two books by Sylvia Townsend Warner published in 1948 and 1962 respectively. Warner is a writer who has received much reappraisal and a popular revival recently. Her exploration of themes of female empowerment, sexuality, and her rich, unbounded imagination, as well as her fascinating and unconventional (for its time) life and worldview have resonated with a modern readership. The cover for her medieval convent-set novel The Corner That Held Them is by Phoebe Llewellyn Smith. Sadly, the most detailed source of information about her comes from an obituary notice in a St Hugh's College, Oxford chronicle. It notes with sadness her death in a sailing accident in September 1953, and recalls that 'her ability to turn ideas into visual images made her a very good illustrator of books that strongly affected her imagination, such as Paradise Lost, Gulliver's Travels, Anna Karenina and The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It also led her to approach the problems of religious painting in a sensitive and original way. In the summer of 1953 she contributed to the exhibition of contemporary religious art held at 45 Park Lane, where her painting of the Last Supper was sold and has since been sent to America'. 

The cover for A Spirit Rises is by Carol Barker, who was born in 1938 and first studied at the Bournemouth College of Art. She designed a number of posters for London Transport and the Post Office, always a good source for the post-war illustrator and graphic designer. Her illustrations formed the basis for H E Bates' Achilles the Donkey book, for which she was a runner-up for the Kate Greenaway Medal. She also worked with Spike Milligan on illustrations for his books.

Summer in Retreat is a debut novel, published in 1957, by Edmund Ward, another Nottingham-born writer. He attained a reputation as a writer of quality drama for ITV, including the legal series The Main Chance in the 70s and the series Justice, with Margaret Rutherford as the barrister Harriet Petersen, as well as episodes of The Professionals, Bergerac and the like. Summer in Retreat concerns a man returning to his home town after having led a beatnik existence (this was the 50s, after all) for a number of years. There may well be an autobiographical element at play here, since Ward himself moved away to live in Sweden when he was young. As for the artist, I'm afraid I have no idea in this instance, but it's a good example of the style of the time.

Who Fears the Devil is a 1963 collection of short stories by Manly Wade Wellman published by the HP Lovecraft referencing Arkham House imprint. Wellman published regularly in Weird Tales magazine, which was also home to fiction by HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and others of their ilk. As the cover image hints, Wellman's weird fiction often had an Appalachian setting, and drew on the rich folklore of the region. Cover artist Lee Brown Coye was known for his illustration for horror and weird fiction magazines and paperbacks. He produced a number of covers for Weird Tales and illustrations for numerous magazines and anthologies. He worked prolifically outside of the field of the macabre as well, as a painter, muralist, silversmith, sculptor and model builder. There seemed little to which he couldn't turn his hand, in fact. 

There are several collections by Herefordshire-born horror writer Elizabeth Walter down in the stacks, all boasting arresting covers. I've only been able to identify the artist responsible for Davy Jones's Tale however. He is Kenneth Farnhill, and he's probably best known for the covers he produced for the Collins Crime Club series in the 50s and 60s. This included a number of Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh novels, as well as books by Nicholas Blake, Julian Symons, Ellis Peters and Rex Stout.

Faber didn't generally publish genre fiction, but they did occasionally venture into weird or fantastic terrain. Hugh Walters was an upstanding member of West Midlands society, a magistrate and Rotarian, with an interest in astronomy and space travel. He looked down on science fiction, regarding it as a cheap and tawdry genre, and reckoned he could do better. He wrote a series of juvenile adventures featuring a central quartet of astronauts, two British, one American and one Russian, all members of the UNEXA space force. The stories were intended to be thrilling but also educative, teaching children about the solar system and the fundamentals of science. The artist responsible for the rather charming covers was Leslie Wood, who produced a number of covers for Faber's juvenile line. His illustrations for Diana Ross' (no, not that one!) Little Red Engine books are particularly lovely, and somewhat redolent of Edward Bawden's work.

Hugh Walters bears no relation to Hugh Walter. Walter singular is in fact Hugh Walter Kelsey. He wrote two detective novels, of which this was the first, published in 1955. He was far better known as an award winning Bridge player, however, who brought his mastery to bear on a good many books on the subject written under his given Kelsey monicker. I have only been able to identify the artist of the thrilling cover image as 'Stein'. The Classic Crime Fiction has been similarly stumped, but has identified a number of other titles for which he produced covers. Whoever Stein was, he was certainly prolific. 

Victor Reinganum produced covers for the Muriel Spark novels The Ballad of Peckham Rye and Robinson, published in 1960 and 1958 respectively. They both have a very distinctive 50s graphic style. and the Robinson cover makes witty play with the aircraft as rosary cross symbolism and with the fake bullethole on the spine. Reinganum also produced the cover for Spark's most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. He was briefly an art director in the early days of Elstree Studios, and was later a prolific illustrator for Radio Times. 

Osbert Sitwell was part of the literary (and literally) aristocratic Sitwell clan, brother to Edith and Sacheverell - all terribly eccentric, of course. Osbert was the novelist of the family, although he did also write travel books, poetry and an autobiography. These two books are collections of his short stories, Death of a God published in 1949 and Alive-Alive Oh! in 1947 (although the stories date from the '20s). The Death of a God has a cover by Harry Cowdell, about whom I can discover very little other than that he was born in 1912 in Fulham and died in 1987. The cover of Alive-Alive Oh! is by Bruce Carrington-Windo, who modestly confined himself to 'Bruce' for his signature. Carrington-Windo began his career producing car illustrations, later branching out into poster and book cover design. He also provided illustrations for the World of Wonder books and the World of Knowledge annuals. The Pan logo was created by Mervyn Peake, who we will come to later. Sitwell would no doubt have approved of the macabre, supernatural element present in both covers. He had an abiding fascination with the paranormal and was a member of the Ghost Club, an organization dedicated to the investigation of strange manifestation. 

The Devil in the Flesh was the first novel by the young French writer Raymond Radiguet, published in 1923. It caused something of a scandal at the time, whilst also attracting widespread praise. Sadly, Radiguet didn't long outlive its appearance in print, dying later in the year of typhoid fever at he age of 20. Radiguet was a protege of Jean Cocteau, and the cover by Gerald Cinamon displays something of a Cocteau influence in its simple but expressive use of line. Cinamon is a highly distinguished graphic designer who has produced numerous book covers, including many for Penguin and their Pelican offshoot. Indeed, he became Chief Designer at Penguin for a number of years. His work beyond the book industry included poster and promotional design for the British Film Institute and the BBC. 

The Unicorn is a novel by Iris Murdoch published by Chatto and Windus in 1963. The cover artist is Christopher Cornford, a great-grandson of Charles Darwin. He and his brother John were both politically committed and joined the Communist party in the mid-30s. They marched against Mosley's fascists and John joined the International Brigades to fight in the Spanish Civil War. His death at the hands of Franco's fascists affected Christopher profoundly and deepened his commitment to causes of social justice. In 1962 he became head of the department of general studies at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, providing students with a broad cultural education to add depth to their artistic studies. He invited a number of authors to join the lecturing staff, and amongst those who accepted was Iris Murdoch. He was very supportive of his students when they joined in with the radical agitation of 1968, and later became an active campaigner for CND and green issues. All this whilst pursuing his own artistic career. I think it can be said that he fulfilled his personal pledge to the spirit of his brother to remain socially engaged and to do his bit to make the world a little better. 

Clarke Hutton, the cover illustrator of Compton Mackenzie's classic Caledonian comedy, was a Stoke Newington born lad. When he was still in his teens he became an assistant stage designer at the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square. He enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1927 where he studied lithography, later going on to teach it at the school. He used his great technical facility in producing numerous book covers and illustrations, generally for children. Alongside publisher and illustrator Noah Carrington (brother of Bloomsbury artist Dora) he was instrumental in setting up the Puffin imprint of children's paperbacks, and provided many illustrations for the line.

Castle in the Sea is a 1955 novel set on the coast of the author's native Brittany. The cover is by William McLaren, a Scottish artist who studied at Edinburgh College of Art. He was a keen Francophile, and as a fluent French speaker would have been able to read this novel in its original language. He provided illustrations for magazines such as Radio Times, The Listener (back copies of which are in the stack) and the illustrated weekly The Sphere. He was also a muralist, creating decorations for a number of castles and country houses in Scotland. His illustrations for Beverley Nichols' popular gardening books brought him particular renown. 

An Experience of India is a 1971 novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabval, well known for her screenplays for Merchant Ivory films. I've no idea who the cover artist is, although it has something of the look of a Puffin illustration. 

That's enough for now. But there's more over here in part two.