4
The Graphic Image: The New Naturalist Dust Jackets

On 1 June 1994, the first dust jackets of Ladybirds rolled off the press and I was there to watch. We – that is, the artist, Robert Gillmor, the printer and myself – were standing in the printing house of Radavian Press on the outskirts of Reading. I was there ostensibly to see how the process worked, but also to enjoy the occasion of the printing of the one hundredth illustrated jacket in the New Naturalist library. The press itself was smaller than I had expected – about the size of a large van. A metal plaque on the side told us that it was a Heidelberg Offset machine, constructed in the late 1970s. It uses a technique called offset lithography which has produced book jackets and coloured plates for this series since the late 1950s, when it replaced the older method of letterpress. Offset lithography is particularly good at creating fine quality prints on smooth paper. Since I am not at all mechanically minded, I hope the reader will forgive me if I do not describe in any detail the process whereby the image is transferred to paper via a series of rollers rotating in opposite directions. The method is widely used in modern printing and is in no sense unusual. There are some unusual aspects of the New Naturalist jackets, but I will come to those later.

First, though, the occasion. The printing machine makes a whumph-whumph noise as the engine drives the aluminium rollers, and the jacket proofs collect in the box-like ‘delivery unit’ below. Tin drums of printing inks line the walls. A tin of yellow ink is open (it will colour the smaller ladybird); it looks like thick, oily custard, and the slightly acrid smell permeates the warehouse. A list of points to be checked hangs from the controls. Some are of a technical nature – ‘Are you sure it’s not catching up?’ ‘Have you checked the star wheels?’ ‘What about the fount?’ – but the most prominent note is of more universal application: ‘Don’t be proud, check again!’ This machine has printed all the New Naturalist jackets since 1986, starting with British Warblers. Because Robert Gillmor lives no more than a mile away, he is able to visit the warehouse on printing day and supervise the colours as they are printed. This means that no proof stage is needed and any necessary adjustments can be made there and then. It is all very convenient and saves a lot of messing about. Whumph, a pilot jacket flips into the box. Robert examines it, with the printer looking over his shoulder. He spots right away that the yellow is not strong enough, so that the nettle leaf on which the larger ladybird sits does not stand out from its background as it should. Today’s printing inks come in a large range of pre-mixed colours and getting the colour right is the work of minutes. By referring to a Pantone chart, the artist can decide there and then on the optimum combination of inks which will deepen the background without distorting the colours of the beetles to an unacceptable degree. We try out a range of progressively deeper yellows, and finally adopt a fairly deep one. It is not the true colour of that particular ladybird, but that scarcely matters, since it is not the function of a jacket to be scientifically exact. The difference is surprising: the nettle leaf seems to snap into focus and the whole design gains in depth, becoming much more eye-catching. ‘Go for that one,’ decides Robert, and within ten minutes the machine has whumph-whumphed its way through a couple of hundred more jackets. When the 1,500 or so jackets needed are ready, they will be baled and sent to Somerset to the printer of the text pages for cutting and fitting around the hardback books. The latter operation is still done by hand.

The printing of the New Naturalist dust jackets has changed a good deal over the years, as any inspection of a complete set will suggest. The earlier jackets are in softer, matt colours (especially if you have the first editions); the later tend to be brighter on average, and one might assume, rightly, that the printing technology has moved on since 1945. The jackets were first printed by contract presses, and later by the Collins printing factory in Glasgow. The range of coloured inks available in the early days was much smaller than today, and the sequence in which they were applied was very important for the desired results. The older inks were also more opaque and tended to change tone on drying. Since the artists were restricted to three or four colours, their designs turned on exploiting the overlaps of the colours to gain a greater range of colours and tones. They were so much masters of this method that it is often difficult to tell what was in fact the colour of the original printing inks.

In this chapter we will look at the design of the jackets in some detail, as far as possible through the eyes of the artists themselves. I will take the reader through the origin of the jackets and their various manifestations over the past fifty years, emphasising the commercial and technical restraints within which the artists had to work. I have also sketched in some biographical background, particularly of Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, in the hope that it sheds some light on their approach to the jackets, and why the New Naturalist library appealed to them so much.

Clifford and Rosemary Ellis

There can be few more satisfying sights for the bibliophile than a complete collection of New Naturalists in their dust jackets. ‘Seen en bloc,’ wrote the bookseller Dr Tim Oldham in 1989, ‘they quite transform a collection and grace a room as well as any Ming vase.’ Designed to be eye-catching, these jackets also succeed as works of art; they have passed the most critical test of all: the test of time. There is no doubt at all that the jackets are a very important part of the reason why these books are so widely collected. Booksellers who specialise in the series will tell you that most collectors absolutely insist on books in their jackets, preferably in bright, shop-fresh condition. That is rather unusual in the field of natural history publishing (though it is very much the rule for modern first editions). Of so much importance are the jackets that the books are deemed imperfect without them.

The designers of these distinctive jackets, Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, were art teachers. For a quarter of a century, Clifford Ellis was Principal of the Bath Academy of Art based at Corsham Court in Wiltshire, with his wife, Rosemary, an active member of the teaching staff. The Academy’s distinctive way of teaching reflected Clifford and Rosemary’s wide interests and conviction that art education should stimulate an enquiring attitude of mind. They believed that a rounded education could be achieved through art, and that, to quote from an early Academy Prospectus, its study should be ‘associated with a constant and first-hand experience of the greater richness of form and colour in Nature’. Their posters and dust jackets reflect that belief, and generally use lithography to achieve the maximum effect.

Clifford and Rosemary Ellis at work in their studio at Lansdown Road, Bath, 1937. (Photo: Kate Collinson/Norman Parkinson Studio)

Clifford Ellis was born in Bognor (plain Bognor then) on 1 March 1907, the eldest son of a commercial artist John Wilson Ellis and his wife Annie Harriet, whom he had married two years earlier. Artistic talent ran in the Ellis genes. His grandfather William Blackman Ellis was an artist and, as it happened, a very keen naturalist. Clifford also saw a lot of his uncle Ralph, a third Ellis artist who made inn-sign painting his speciality. A stay of a few months duration with ‘Grandfather Ellis’ at Arundel during the Great War made a great impression on the nine-year-old Clifford, and kindled his interest in nature study. Clifford ‘brought a touch of the country to his bedroom’ when he returned to his parents in Highbury. His younger sister remembers stick insects, lizards and three toads or frogs called Freeman, Hardy and Willis. Grandfather Ellis’s knowledge of taxidermy had inspired in Clifford an interest in animal anatomy as the basis of animal drawing and painting. At Highbury he ‘often boiled up small dead creatures to produce little skeletons, so that he could study their bone structure…he once caused alarm by fainting while dissecting a rabbit.’

Given all this, it was fortunate that when Clifford went to a school in Finsbury, he found himself within reach of London Zoo, which he began to use as a kind of living reference library. He was given a free pass, and thereafter was often to be seen there, sketching the animals on the spot or memorising details of their form and behaviour. At least one New Naturalist jacket, that of British Seals, was based on first hand observation at London Zoo. It was obvious that young Clifford was going to be an artist. He was, needless to say, a clever boy.

Clifford attended full-time courses at two London art schools before taking postgraduate diploma courses in art teaching and art history, in 1928 and 1929 respectively. In the former year, he joined the staff of the Regent Street Polytechnic, where he taught perspective and was in charge of the First Year in the Art School. One of the students there was his future wife, Rosemary Collinson. Like Clifford, Rosemary comes from a family background of talented artists and craftsmen. Her grandfather was a partner in the well-known firm of furniture designers Collinson and Locke, and her father was a skilled cabinet maker. Through her mother, Rosemary was related to Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a prolific writer and inventor of the clerihew, the best known form of poetic doodle since the limerick. Their marriage in 1931 was the start of a creative partnership in which Rosemary, with her instinctive eye for colour, tone and composition, her abilities as artist, designer and teacher, and her talent for perceptive criticism, played a very active part. Nearly all their freelance work was signed jointly. Sometimes the initials R & CE were used for work initiated by Rosemary, C & RE for work initiated by Clifford, though the latter, alphabetical, version was increasingly used to indicate joint authorship. Either way, the joint signature indicated the nature of their collaboration. As a close friend, Colin Thompson, wrote in an unpublished memoir in 1986, it symbolised ‘the kind of partnership that is nowadays almost unknown in art and occurs only very rarely in any sphere. It was as much part of the essence [of their teaching] as it was of the rest of Clifford’s work.’

The Ellises excelled in that epitome of popular art, poster design. Between the wars a number of organisations, both in the public and private sector, made a practice of commissioning artists to design their advertising posters. Many of the leading artists of the day contributed to such work, and superb original designs would trail past on the sides of trolley-buses or on the tailboards of lorries. One of the earliest Ellis commissions advertised Whipsnade Zoo by Car, and was produced for BP Limited. It was designed to catch the eye at a distance: a pack of wolves stare intently at the onlooker from the darkness of the trees with great round eyes. Like so much of their work, the design was based on first hand observation. Rosemary told me the story behind the picture. In those days the Ellises were great walkers and they thought little of walking to Whipsnade Zoo, out on the Bedfordshire downs, from the centre of London and by night. Arriving exhausted just before dawn, they tumbled into a dry ditch full of leaves close to Wolf Wood and fell asleep. When Rosemary and Clifford awoke out of a surprisingly comfortable cocoon of leaves, it was to find the wolves staring back at them. The poster was designed with that arresting image fresh in their minds.

C & RE poster advertising Whipsnade Zoo and BP Petrol, 1932. (Private collection)

The wolf poster was one of many advertising posters C & RE designed for different clients during the 1930s, among others for the Empire Marketing Board, the Post Office and Shell Mex. Particularly striking, and in some respects reminiscent of their later New Naturalist jackets, is a series of four posters they did for London Passenger Transport Board, entitled ‘Wood’, ‘Heath’, ‘Downland’ and ‘River’, this last depicting a wise old heron hidden in the reeds, while above is the watery reflection of a tea party in a punt. Several of C & RE’s posters were shown at the New Burlington Galleries, London, in ‘Pictures in Advertising by Shell Mex and BP Ltd’ opened by Kenneth Clark in 1934. Various of their posters and other designs have since been included in other exhibitions, among them ‘Historical and British Wallpaper’ at the Suffolk Galleries, London in 1945, ‘Art for All’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1949, and, more recently, in the Arts Council exhibitions ‘Thirties’ and ‘Landscape in Britain 1850-1950’ in 1979/80 and 1983 respectively. What characterises so much of their work is their mastery of lithography, a difficult medium which demands a good eye for colour and a boldness of design. They were to use similar techniques for the New Naturalist book jackets. Though smaller than the posters, their main purpose was the same: to catch the eye.

Top C & RE poster for London Passenger Transport Board, 1939. (Private collection)
Above C & RE design labelled ‘Bus streamer “Summer is Flying” for London Passenger Transport Board’ 1938. (Private collection)

The Second World War brought a temporary halt to the Ellises’ freelance design work (which had by then broadened into other fields like wallpaper design, mosaics and some very striking dust jackets for Jonathan Cape). In 1936, the couple moved from London to Bath where Clifford took up a new post as assistant headmaster of the Bath Art School (then part of the city’s Technical College) and was appointed headmaster two years later. The Art School remained operational throughout the war, despite several changes of premises. As Clifford put it at the time, ‘the arts provide a deeper and richer life that we can all share, and the war with its upheavals has provided opportunities which have made this sharing more possible than it has been for several generations’. Besides running the Art School, Clifford’s wartime activities included work as a camouflage officer, service in the Home Guard and, in different official capacities, making pictorial records in Bath of bomb-damaged buildings and of architectural ironwork threatened with removal for salvage. Rosemary continued teaching at the Royal School for the Daughters of Officers of the British Army even after it was evacuated from Bath to Longleat. This meant having to get up at 5.30, take a bus to Frome where her bike was hidden behind a telephone kiosk, and cycling all the way to Longleat – all war long. It says something about the England of those years that the bicycle was never pilfered or vandalised.

Among the acquaintances of the Ellises at Bath was the venerable Walter Sickert, the grand old man of British painting, who, at his own suggestion, gave a weekly lecture at the Bath School of Art, mostly on the work of artists he particularly admired, Degas and Daumier among them. In the 1960s Clifford Ellis gave a lecture about Sickert, broadcast on BBC’s Third Programme, which was frequently moving as it brings that great artist vividly back to life. Another of the friendships they made at this time was with Sickert’s pupil, Lord Methuen, and this was to have important consequences. After the war, Methuen’s beautiful country house, Corsham Court, ten miles east of Bath, was returned by the war department. In the belief that such houses had an important contribution to make to the postwar future, Methuen offered the main part of the house to the Bath Academy of Art. Clifford was thereupon faced with a watershed choice, for he had been offered the Chair of Fine Art at Newcastle. He opted for the challenge of creating a new residential art school at Corsham, with courses designed to train students to meet the needs of postwar Britain. The Bath Academy of Art opened at Corsham with Clifford Ellis as Principal in October 1946. The Ellises established themselves in the top floor of one wing. In the meantime, C & RE had started to design jackets for ‘an important new series of natural history books’ to be published by Collins.

The Bath Academy of Art became the practical manifestation of C & RE’s views on art education. In the early years, the school offered a training course for art teachers and a four-year course leading to the National Diploma in Design. The range of subjects taught was unusually wide. It encompassed dance, drama and music; dyeing, weaving and fabric printing; lettering and typography; textile and stage design; as well as sculpture, pottery, drawing and painting. Many of the staff were practitioners who taught part time, and a number became leaders in their particular field. Natural history was also on the syllabus. In keeping with C & RE’s belief in the value of ‘constant and first hand experience’ of the richness of colour and form in nature, Clifford created a bog garden, an alpine garden and several aviaries, where a range of exotic bird and plant species could be studied. Various other birds and beasts were kept there at different times, notably chickens, bantams, geese, ducks, goats, a pig and even a couple of crocodiles. All did duty as teaching aids as well as contributing to the general ambience.

Opinions seem sharply divided on the place of Bath Academy of Art in the development of art education. One future teacher there had been warned that ‘Clifford had a lot of funny ideas. Corsham was trying to teach too many things all at once…and was not a serious art school at all – the students were only dabbling in drawing and painting and sculpture’. Others place him high on the list of the more influential postwar art educationalists. The point was that Clifford Ellis taught as a practising artist. Like his mentor, Marion Richardson, he believed in teaching by suggestion, by opening windows and encouraging the student to develop his or her own talent. He wanted to draw from them the same sense of vocation that he had always felt himself, ‘like a gardener tending his plants’.

This is not the place (and I am not the person) to try to analyse how far he succeeded. It is worth observing though that Clifford’s educational aims were analogous to those of the New Naturalist library, and both were part of the mood of the time. I remember reading an article in Country Life where Clifford and Rosemary’s colourful wallpaper designs were said to ‘brighten the postwar gloom’. Gloom in terms of austerity perhaps, but the prevailing mood was far from gloomy. The immediate postwar era was a time of optimism, when it was hoped that the cooperative spirit generated by the war effort would be mirrored in peacetime by a collective will to build a better Britain, with health care available to all and secondary education guaranteed to every child in the land. There was a major investment in education, and the Academy’s teacher training course was created in response to the urgent national demand for teachers. Clifford Ellis and James Fisher had something more in common than a love of birdwatching. They were both ardent popularists: just as Clifford’s mission was to bring art into the lives of ordinary people, so Fisher wanted to introduce the latest fruits of science and natural history to a wide audience, and to encourage mass participation. Neither saw any reason to debase their subject by doing so. This happy convergence of aims – for the Bath Academy of Art and the New Naturalist library came into being at about the same time (after a period of planning in wartime) – might help to explain why Clifford and Rosemary Ellis readily accepted the invitation from the Collins Board to design jackets for the new books. It might go also some way to explaining why these designs were so successful. It was a question of rising to the occasion.

C & RE: the standard bearers

Not everyone admires the New Naturalist jackets. People who have grown used to associating nature with photographic realism can be puzzled by them, and ask openly what the fuss is about. I have seen them described as coloured daubs or (not inaccurately) ‘smudgy hieroglyphs’. Like most good things, the Ellis jackets are an acquired taste. There were evidently periodic crises of confidence on the New Naturalist Board itself when someone wondered whether the use of photographic jackets might increase sales (though when it was tried in 1965, they found that it did not). Perhaps the least impressed critic on record was The Spectator’s reviewer of The Greenshank (1951), who regarded the rather stylised jacket design as ‘vulgar’ and ‘a brutal shame’ and advised purchasers to remove and burn it.

Showcard advertising the New Naturalist series designed by C & RE in 1947 for use at book exhibitions. (Private collection)

Those who admire the Ellis dust jackets probably understand the difference between a visual statement and an illustration (which Clifford Ellis himself will explain better than I can). Working within tight technical constraints, which varied from title to title and are discussed below, C & RE designed each jacket to suggest at a glance the book’s content. It was never their intention to represent any subject in precise anatomical detail. The jackets are best regarded not as illustrations but as mini-posters which require a fairly simple, strong image – as Clifford put it, ‘not too banal, nor too original’ – to make an impact in the shop, and entice the onlooker to open the book. Lithography lends itself to bold designs conceived to make imaginative use of a very few ink colours. Invariably working from first hand observation, C & RE would select for their designs those aspects of a bird, beast, plant or landscape that would best communicate the spirit of the book in a single clear visual image. The reader might be interested to learn which jackets they themselves considered had achieved that aim most successfully. Those which Rosemary Ellis chose for two exhibitions in 1989 and 1990 were Trees, Woods and Man, The Rabbit, The Herring Gull’s World, The Folklore of Birds and Insect Natural History. It is notable that C & RE put as much effort into the design of the rather unsung New Naturalist monographs as they did the main series. For an exhibition in York, they picked out the preliminary artwork for Ants (i.e. the second Ants, published in 1977), British Thrushes and the recently completed Natural History of Shetland, as well as the jackets of Moths, Pedigree, Herring Gull, The Wood Pigeon, The World of Soil, Fish and Fisheries, The Trout and The Rabbit. Clearly they were aiming to present a balanced series of contrasting designs, but their choice must also reflect a personal preference. Among Rosemary’s favourite jackets are those of The Wren, Finches, The Heron, Inheritance and An Angler’s Entomology. Perhaps the reader has his or her own favourites (as I have). But the level of consistency achieved by the Ellises throughout the 86 jackets they designed for the series is remarkable.

Their earliest fan was Billy Collins himself, who always made sure that the latest Ellis jackets were among those displayed at the annual National Book League exhibition. He was delighted when, during a visit to the Collins factory by the Queen, the latter picked out the New Naturalist jackets as designs which she particularly liked. Immediately after the Queen’s departure, Collins was on the phone to the Ellises to report Her Majesty’s words. Billy Collins made a habit of writing to them whenever they produced a design he considered outstanding. Typical of many others is a letter written in 1960 about the Dragonflies jacket, which had been much admired by the New Naturalist Board: ‘I think it is amazing how you go on year after year thinking out such lovely designs. The series makes such an effective display in the shops, largely owing to the designs’.

The Ellises’ association with the New Naturalist library began in July 1944. The Collins publicity person, Ruth Atkinson, had in the previous decade worked for the publishers Jonathan Cape and remembered the attractive dust jackets that the couple had designed for a number of Cape novels. (Two of these are illustrated on Plate 2.) At that stage, more thought had gone into the purpose and breadth of the New Naturalist series, and into commissioning titles for it, than in the appearance of the books on the shelf. The Editorial Board may have taken it for granted that the jackets would incorporate a colour photograph, perhaps one taken from the body of the book. That would certainly have fitted in with the ‘philosophy’ of the series, printed opposite the title page of each book, with its emphasis on ‘the latest methods of colour photography and reproduction’. The surviving correspondence seems to confirm this supposition. In passing, Billy Collins refers to the notion of placing ‘small photographs at the centre of [the] botanical or biological sections [of the library?]’, while Ruth Atkinson advised Clifford Ellis to try to win over James Fisher ‘to the idea of non-photographic jackets’. We might suppose that the photographic editor Eric Hosking was particularly keen to get a photograph onto the jacket, while Billy Collins, with his interest in contemporary art and still greater interest in sales, might have preferred something more adventurous to make a dramatic impact and proclaim an important new series of books. In 1944, colour photographs of British wildlife in natural surroundings were still hard to come by and of indifferent quality; it was not until the 1960s that laminated photographic jackets became the norm for natural history books. Dust jacket design, on the other hand, was then in its heyday, and book collectors often judge the postwar years as the high point of that particular art. At any rate, no clear decision seems to have been taken. Ruth Atkinson decided to take matters into her own hands.

Dear Mr and Mrs Ellis,

It is such a long time since I have seen you and I wonder if you are now feeling at all inclined to do book jackets.

I left Cape’s about six months after the beginning of the war, was in the Ministry of Labour three years…and am now working at Collins as you see.

We are going to do an important series of books dealing with various Natural History subjects, they will have a great many colour illustrations and I thought that you would do lovely jackets for them. There are however a great many people whom the jacket must please: besides Mr Collins, the editorial committee of this series and the producers of it, Messrs Adprint. If from this brief note you are at all interested in the idea, could you send me some of your work so that I may show it to Mr Collins; and if you would like to work out a rough, say for the first title, I will send you a lot more information about it all. I don’t imagine you will be coming up to London but of course if you were it would be better still to discuss it.

Ruth Atkinson. unpublished letter, dated 20 July 1944

The Ellises’ response was to invite Ruth Atkinson down to Bath for a weekend to discuss the project. She warned them that they were not the only artists that had been invited to submit designs for the New Naturalist jackets, but in the event the others dropped out and the Ellises were alone in sending finished artwork. Billy Collins had had the great good luck of finding the right artists at first pitch. On her return to London after ‘a deliciously comfortable and peaceful time’ in Bath, Ruth sent them the authors’ synopses of the first titles and some ‘pulls’ of printed colour photographs taken by Sam Beaufoy, Eric Hosking and others. On the basis of these guidelines, the Ellises set to work on jacket designs for the first two books in the series, Butterflies and The Naturalist in London (eventually published as London’s Natural History).

If the Ellises were given any further artistic guidance it does not survive in the correspondence. It seems likely that the basic design of the now familiar New Naturalist jackets, with their broad title band and oval, and the circle containing the number of the book in the series, was the Ellises’ own. What appears to have been the original colour ‘rough’ for Butterflies still survives in perfect fresh condition, and is reproduced on Plate 1. It is exactly twice the size of the printed jacket, executed in gouache paint on thick Whatman paper. Although there were minor modifications to the finished design, this is already the familiar Butterflies wrapper of swallowtails floating in a Broadland landscape. It is a characteristically bold design, in bright colours designed for lithographic reproduction and reminiscent of some of the Ellises poster work for London Passenger Transport Board. Already we see some of the hallmarks of the future New Naturalist jackets. The design is boldly conceived, divided not horizontally, as might be expected, but into two vertical planes of focus: the magnified caterpillar on its foamy foodplant on the left, the under life-sized butterflies flying away from the viewer to the right, and, in the distance, a characteristic Ellis motif: a vignette of a Norfolk landscape with windmill, willows and the open Broad. It was probably the contrasting colours of the adult butterfly and its caterpillar that attracted the artists. The weakest point of the design is the repeated motif of the caterpillar on the spine. For most of the later designs, they would find often ingenious ways of integrating the spine with the main design. The depiction of different life-stages and the surrounding habitat is suited to E.B. Ford’s text, and the graphic style suggests that this book is not intended to be a traditional identification guide. That 20,000 readers bought a copy of this book in less than a year suggests that the jacket did its job; the excellence of the text and the attractiveness of the subject did the rest. By chance, Eric Hosking’s camera caught Dudley Stamp studying the jacket at a New Naturalist editorial meeting some time in 1945. He, at any rate, looks well pleased with it.

The colophon for the series was also devised at this time. Clifford Ellis tinkered with the initial letters of New Naturalist until he found a satisfactory solution: the familiar, beautifully rendered capital letters, transfixed by an emblem of a natural object appropriate to the particular book. In the first instance, the emblem was a stickleback, which may have been intended for use on each title. By the time the jacket of Butterflies was printed however, the stickleback had been replaced by a caterpillar (though it does eventually swim back into view on the jacket of Life in Lakes and Rivers, published in 1951).

The original stickleback colophon designed by C & RE for the series in 1944. (Private collection)

The Butterflies rough was accompanied by a colour sketch of ducks on a pond, intended for the London book. Though not adopted in that form, the Ellises developed the idea of reflections in water for the gull design eventually used, with the dome of St Paul’s reflected in muddy waters. Possibly the Tufted Duck on the spine was inherited from the earlier design.

Billy Collins liked the designs immediately, and on the strength of them commissioned the Ellises to design jackets for the first six books of the series. It seems that he did so before inviting the views of the editors, although he might have had a word with Fisher or Huxley first. To aid the printing process, the Ellises were asked to produce each design at the exact scale of reproduction. They also decided to hand-letter the title, with singularly beautiful results (though some may not have noticed that the early titles were hand-lettered at all!).

Printing costs became the first problem and a recurrent one. Rather than printing the jackets themselves, Collins and Adprint decided to commission Thomas E. Griffits of Baynard Press, well known for his ability to transcribe artists’ designs. Lithography was a relatively expensive process, requiring good quality paper to absorb the inks. Moreover, since each colour had to be laid on in sequence, the costs rose for each new colour printed. The economic limit was a mere four colours, and at a later stage, Collins was pleading for three or even two. For an artist striving to capture the colourful world of nature, this presented a severe limitation. Clifford Ellis had initially suggested that 7 or 8 colours would be ideal. With only half that amount available, an exactness of colour tone would become a critical matter for the printer, and the artists would have to come up with imaginative designs that make the best use of overlapping colours to produce additional hues and tones. In short, the more niggardly the colour allowance, the greater the demand on the artist and printer. There were alternative ways of printing that offered a wider range of colours, but only at the expense of their brightness. The vivid colours and general effect of the Ellis designs depended on lithography. ‘Please let it be litho,’ wrote Clifford Ellis to Collins. ‘We will make things as easy as possible for the printer.’

As an illustration of how the artists were able to obtain an arresting design using such limited palettes of colours, we could do worse than examine a dust jacket that they, and others, regarded as one of their best: that of Trees, Woods and Man. Lesser artists might have conjured up a scene of logs and lumberjacks, but the Ellises approach is more tangential. We are in the midst of a plantation, that much is obvious. The trees are rooted in plough lines and are set close together, the dappled green of the canopy contrasting with the sepulchral gloom of the woodland interior. There is no need for human figures: each tree bears a mysterious number and the hand of Man is clear. The scene has the sturdy geometry of many of the Ellises poster designs, the vertical lines of the trunks and the diagonals of the boughs harmonise nicely and are pleasing to the eye. Even the broad title band does not detract unduly. What is not so obvious is that this intriguing scene is made up of only three colours: black, brown and ‘fresh green’, printed in that order. All the rest is professional trickery, exploiting the overlaps to gain extra colours and creating further tonality by stippling. As to what the picture means, the Ellises are not saying. It might contain a comment on modern forestry methods or it might not. It is not even clear whether the trees are broadleaves or conifers. The reader will have to open the book. In a letter congratulating them on the excellence of this cover, the author, Herbert Edlin, explained what the jacket actually represents. It depicts a Forestry Commission sample plot, in which each tree is numbered and measured every few years to determine the rate of growth. Personally, I had always assumed that the numbers meant that the trees were ‘doomed’ for felling; on the contrary, they are ‘saved’!

Jacket of London’s Natural History (1945).

Jacket of Trees, Woods and Man (1956). [see also Plate 11]

The second hurdle facing the Ellises in 1944 was to win over the editors, who, as we have seen, were predisposed to use photographs. James Fisher was delegated to visit the Ellises to gain a first-hand impression of their ideas and techniques. ‘I hope you get on well with Fisher and win him over to the idea of non-photographic jackets,’ wrote Ruth Atkinson, perhaps a little nervously. It seems the meeting was a success, on both counts. Fisher was a connoisseur of illustrated books and bird art and became a devoted admirer of the Ellises’ work. Moreover, by this stage they had new designs to show him, including the Gould-inspired cover of British Game, depicting a grey partridge, its head turned dramatically above the title band. Billy Collins was bowled over by it, ‘I am absolutely delighted ...... I think it is quite lovely in every way. I wonder if some day you might do some big illustrated book of individual birds on the lines of Gould?’ Fisher returned a convert. Whatever lingering doubts might have remained were soon dispelled by the series of original and exciting designs produced by the Ellises through 1945: the closely observed anatomy of Insect Natural History, the lovely colours of Natural History in the Highlands and Islands (with the only bright colour reserved for the diver’s eye, which lies at the optical centre of the picture), the melting cliffscape of Britain’s Structure and Scenery and the semi-abstract collage of fungal patterns for Mushrooms and Toadstools. They would light up the drab shelves of postwar bookshops like a burst of sunshine, and proclaim the New Naturalist books to be something altogether new, and of challenging quality. The original commission for six designs was extended indefinitely. The Ellises were henceforth as much a part of the New Naturalist ‘family’ as the editors and authors. At the end of 1945, Ruth Atkinson wrote to tell them that the jackets had been a great success. The editors liked them and ‘so does everyone else. I am delighted with them and feel very god-motherly about them.’

The design that caused the most argument was the very first: that of Butterflies. The editors felt that the choice of the swallowtail was unfortunate. It was rare and, they said, unfamiliar, and one of the purposes of the series had been to guide the naturalist away from his traditional obsession with rarity. The Ellises patiently began work on a new design of a more ‘familiar’ butterfly, the dark green fritillary, though Billy Collins made it plain to them that he was quite happy with the original: ‘Personally I have always liked the Swallow Tail (sic) and I hope you will do this. I do not think the criticism of its being rare matters and I do not think one could get anything more lovely.’ And, because time was getting short, the swallowtail it was to be. Clifford Ellis was critical of the printed jacket. The blue was not deep enough, and hence the title failed to stand out as it should; and the yellow was too orangey. The problem of pale colours grew worse on the reprints of this very popular title, and when the printers attempted to redeem the jacket by using a screen they merely succeeded in making it look rather grubby and a far cry from the brilliant colours intended. Even so, it was a good start and the Butterflies jacket set the style for the whole series.

Jacket of British Game (1946).

The modus operandi developed very quickly. The Ellises would be sent ‘pulls’ from the plates for each title, and, usually, a portion of the text or the author’s synopsis in order to gauge the book’s content and style. They would produce a coloured rough, based on various preliminary sketches, which would be shown to the editors and returned with their comments. Sometimes the author’s opinion was also sought. Occasionally a design would be turned down, but more often, modifications were suggested, usually with regard to scientific accuracy. The original generalised gull on the front of London’s Natural History, for example, was transformed at Fisher’s suggestion into a specific black-headed gull in winter plumage by simply adding a dark crescent behind the left eye. The feet on the Yellow Wagtail jacket were redrawn to conform with Fisher’s reminder that ‘the whole of the claw should be flat on the ground…the claw is lifted off in one movement, not as in [human] walking, and the back leg is a little higher’. Occasionally pedantic insistence on strict realism stood in the way of a promising design, as with The British Amphibians and Reptiles. To the author, who grumbled that the colours of the adder chosen for the design were all wrong, and in particular that no adder ever showed pure white, Clifford explained that:

‘We are aware that adders are not white, but, new-sloughed, they gleam in the sun. Our problem was to find something that would gleam in a bookshop and could be printed in four colours......Our idea of “accuracy” is to base our design on first hand experience of the subject, selecting such aspects of it as are appropriate and possible for the job – but it is not our intention to make a coloured diagram, nor is this a practical possibility in four colours.’

Clifford Ellis. Unpublished letter to Raleigh Trevelyan, 1 January 1950

The business of strict accuracy versus graphic impact is best expounded by Clifford Ellis himself, in a reply to a letter from Professor H.J. Fleure proposing a particular design for The Natural History of Man in Britain. Fleure had envisaged a hill fort ‘rising like an island above wooded slopes’ with armed sentries standing on top of it (to conform with a request from the Sales department to incorporate a man on the cover). Clifford’s reply was as follows:

‘I will begin, I hope not too impertinently, by saying something about book jackets. A book jacket is by way of being a small poster; it is part of the machinery of book selling. Though, obviously enough, the jacket should be in keeping with the book it contains, it is unwise to consider it as an opportunity for an additional illustration. An illustration, as against the jacket, can be seen at leisure and free from the competition of not always very mannerly neighbours. The jacket should be immediately interesting; its forms and colours should make a very clear and distinctive image. If it does its job, the book will be taken down and opened, and the proper illustrations will be seen. We suggest, therefore, that the hill fort should be seen from the air. Though one would lose the sentries, who would be too small to show, one would gain a more striking view of the earthworks and (speaking now as a sometime camouflage officer) there would be a remarkable colour contrast between the smooth grass of the hill and the dark tree foliage of its surroundings.’

Clifford Ellis. Unpublished letter to H.J. Fleure, 4 August 1948

In the event, the jacket dispensed with most of the trees as well as the sentries by adopting Fleure’s further suggestion of the Uffington White Horse on the bare Berkshire downs and the autumn colours of All Souls, as one of ‘the two outstanding dates of the prehistoric calendar’. They agreed on a bill-hook for the colophon, though Clifford later changed his mind and substituted an arrow-head as a more appropriate symbol of prehistoric technology.

The Ellises often went to considerable lengths to obtain a first-hand acquaintance with their subjects. Special trips were made to Shetland and Orkney in the 1980s in search of material on which to base jacket designs. The jacket of Mushrooms and Toadstools is based on dozens of exquisite pencil sketches in which Clifford experimented with fungal form and texture before deciding on a design (see next page). For the animal titles, his experience of observing and sketching inmates at the zoo proved invaluable. Clifford once confided that the beautiful pellucid jacket of British Seals was

Jacket of A Natural History of Man in Britain (1951).

Pencil sketches of fungi from life by C & RE, elements of which formed the basis of the design of the Mushrooms and Toadstools jacket. (Private collection)

‘a consequence of a visit to the London Zoo where I could be sure of seeing a pike in the Aquarium, to stimulate further thoughts about Patterns in Nature. From time to time I went out into the bitter wind to watch the seals and how they swim – like monstrous trout, an extraordinary adaptation…The author might like a present of the French accouder which says for the fore limbs what to kneel says for the hind ones. He will know better than I that the seal doesn’t use only the flipper but, with great versatility, the whole limb, and when ashore, to see what is going on, may support itself on its elbows like an old lady at her window-sill. Habitual but, in English, nameless.’

Clifford Ellis, unpublished letter to Michael Walter, 17 January 1973

While in many cases the Ellises were given a free hand with the design within the technical limits imposed, in others they worked within a framework of suggestions by the authors or the editors or by both. W.B. Turrill wanted to have sea campions on the wrapper of British Plant Life, which rather circumscribed the choice of colours and setting. For his Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone, J.E. Lousley had suggested ‘rolling downs and a chalk face in the background’, which they broadly adopted but went one better by substituting the Westbury White Horse for a chalk pit. With the text of Climate and the British Scene came the idea of ‘sky and cumulus cloud, giving the suggestion of changeable weather, with typical scenery included’. For An Angler’s Entomology, James Fisher suggested ‘a mayfly and a lure mayfly’. With The Sea Coast came ideas for lighthouses and windblown trees. And so on. Perhaps the tallest order was for the jacket of Life in Lakes and Rivers for which C & RE were asked to produce ‘an impression of a lake in section, with a fish in it, and an insect or two, and a fisherman above, and perhaps a factory in the background, and some plants and some reeds’. With a characteristic touch of wit, they got around the clutter of fishermen and insects by substituting an angler’s float, which became the motif of the spine. The factory was transformed into a bridge and weir. But they remained faithful to the overall concept envisaged by the editors.

Pencil sketch of perch by C & RE used in the design of the Life in Lakes and Rivers jacket. (Private collection)

Very often, as in Lakes and Rivers, a key part of the design was fulfilled by the spine, which is, of course, the first part of the book most customers will see. If it failed in its purpose of persuading him to remove the book from the shelf, then all the rest of the design would have been in vain. The spines of postwar dust jackets were often left plain in order to display the title, the publishers’ imprint and other information. In one of the most attractive features of the New Naturalist jackets, however, the spine is not only an integral part of the jacket design, but also often incorporates a key part of the subject – the angler’s float, the woodpecker’s red skullcap on Woodland Birds, the red blotch on the beak of Tinbergen’s herring gull, the trawler’s sail on Fish and Fisheries, the delightful begging chicks of The Wren and The Heron. If anyone could resist taking The Heron down to feast their eyes upon that riot of beaks and eyeballs he must have been a resisting sort of person. In other cases, the spines echo the theme of the front jacket: the wing on Sea-Birds, or the dragonfly’s body on Insect Natural History. Sometimes the spine symbolises the book’s contents, like the fork on Man and the Land, or the battlement and flag on Man and Birds. Often these ‘echoes’ contain a touch of humour: the brilliant red ‘No Entry’ sign on Nature Conservation in Britain, or the array of birds and beasts that peep round from the front on many of the later titles. There is a gaiety in designs like Finches, British Tits and Hedges which surely reflects the artists’ enjoyment in producing them.

Artwork of jacket for A Country Parish. (Private collection)

Not all the Ellis designs were as immediately convincing as The Heron or Finches. The first dust jacket to make the publishers scratch their heads rather than leap in the air with joy was for A Country Parish, Arnold Boyd’s hymn of joy to his native Great Budworth. The Ellises had based the design on the weathercock of a church steeple. The rest is all sky, clouds and whirling swallows. Ruth Atkinson’s reaction was ‘Yes, but ..... The idea is fresh, so it needs imagination.’ You can almost hear her pause, say ‘um’, then pluck up courage and ask, rather plaintively, ‘Why are there rounded feathers on the weathercock?’

The Collins sales staff made a more serious objection to the original jacket design for The Open Sea: The World of Plankton by Alister Hardy. Both Hardy and his editor James Fisher had wanted planktonic animals on the jacket, and the Ellises obliged with a beautiful design based on real microscopic organisms. Unfortunately, for all their accuracy, the animals might have been from outer space so far as the book department was concerned. ‘I must ask you one thing,’ wrote Raleigh Trevelyan. ‘Did you invent these animals, or are they ones that exist?’ They would not do in either case. The sales people were convinced that the public were not ready for plankton designs, and the artists were asked instead to ‘convey a sense of mystery and movement in the open sea’. Curiously enough, at the request of Collins they provided a third cover for a projected reprint of The World of Plankton some twenty years later, for which they returned to the original idea of microscopic life. Unfortunately, although the author congratulated the artists on capturing so well the spirit of living plankton, and a colour proof was soon afterwards made, this too was put aside as rising costs had rendered the book uneconomic to reprint. ‘The World of Plankton jackets have had a sad history,’ remarked Clifford Ellis in 1983, as another classic title went out of print. Here, at least, the reader can compare all three on Plate 8 and decide for himself which is the most effective at expressing the spirit of Hardy’s book.

In a few instances, the printed wrapper failed for various reasons to live up to the original concept of the artists. Squirrels caused a shock, and a post mortem was held with the printers and blockmakers over the unexpected heaviness of tone on the squirrel’s face, which ruined the artists’ conception. The problem in this case lay in the technical complications of a design which relied on stippling rather than the solid tones of earlier jackets. For Grass and Grasslands, the artists had intended to create a contrasting dark tone for the trees and dairy cows by overprinting two different tones of green. Unfortunately these were printed in the wrong order, producing a more wishy-washy colour than was intended, thus losing the expected impact. It was to prevent casualties of this sort that Clifford Ellis insisted on inspecting the printer’s colour proof before allowing the jackets to be printed. As a memo to the printers remarked, ‘He is very fussy about matching tones and knows a great deal about it.’ When sending the proof of Inheritance and Natural History to Ellis, the editor had commented, a bit lamely, that ‘we think it looks very nice’. Clifford returned it with a characteristic annotation: ‘It is nearly right. The grey, though the right tone, would have a more lively effect in the colour scheme if it matched the specified Pantone, i.e. if it had slightly more “Reflex Blue” and slightly less “yellow”. I am glad you like it. PS. Perhaps ‘COLLINS’ should be a little larger and bolder.’ For Hedges, in which the design turns on the contrasting colours of an orange-tip butterfly, his instructions were to render the orange ‘brilliant’. He repeated the word at the end of a telephone conversation with someone from Collins. ‘Remember, the colour must be brilliant,’ he reminded them, ‘brilliant.’

Pencil sketches of a redstart, part of the preliminary artwork for The Redstart jacket. (Private collection)

Pencil sketches of bee orchid flowers by C & RE, for the original design of Wild Orchids of Britain. (Private collection)

When so much turned on the ability of the printer to interpret the artist’s intentions accurately, it was vital to have a blockmaker with the ability ‘to see’, as Clifford put it, ‘with the artist’s eye’. So long as the contract remained with Thomas Griffits, the process seems to have run smoothly enough. It was when the costs of colour printing rose steeply in 1950 and Billy Collins decided to try to make the blocks more cheaply elsewhere that problems started to mount. Hitherto, C & RE had produced a finished gouache painting on rough-surfaced Whatman watercolour paper (which produced their characteristic ‘speckling’ effect on the colour boundaries) for the blockmaker to copy. Now they were asked to produce separated colours for each new design on Bristol Board or transparent plastic sheets to allow the printer to photograph each in turn and then superimpose them. They tried out both methods for the next design, Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone. The printer’s proofs were wholly disappointing, the intensity of the colours being reduced to a shadow of the original. When Ellis tried out the remaining alternative, drawing directly onto the block, the returned proof was even worse, losing much of the fine detail and chalk work.

These flops coincided with a period when New Naturalist production was in danger of running out of control. There were some dozen titles in the queue, and the Ellises were becoming overwhelmed with work. Several of their recent designs had been returned. The original jacket of Wild Orchids of Britain had depicted a bee orchid but the editors were of the opinion that ‘the public will mistake [it] for an animal in the shop. I think it would be better if [they] chose another orchid which has a sensational shape and beautiful colour but which bears no resemblance to an animal.’ Neither was the original of Birds and Men liked much, since it repeated the London’s Natural History motif of gulls. C & RE managed to replace some of the gulls with lapwings, but they were clearly getting fed up. ‘The whole business is on the point of becoming a bore,’ Clifford wrote on 15 August 1950. ‘Each design calls for first-hand research and, as often as not, long journeys, although the final selection of material suitable for a jacket may give little indication of what has been discarded. There is therefore little financial advantage in doing the jobs at all and the unsatisfactory handling of the reproduction at the end of it all is discouraging.’ Billy Collins saw the warning light and recognised that the recent experiments in cost cutting had been a false economy. ‘Your designs are so much admired by everyone, and have become so much a part of the series, that we must get the best possible results when they are reproduced.’

For the moment, then, the designs continued to be printed in the established way, with the Ellises producing gouache paintings on Whatman paper. A year or two later, however, the contract was given to Odhams Ltd, who presumably offered a cheaper rate using a new technique. Unfortunately the method failed to reproduce accurately some of the subtle colour gradations produced by the Ellises, and created harsh black edges and inaccurate tones. The first such jacket, that of Ants, was passable, although the blockmaker had decided for some reason to smother the original design in grey paint. But for Flowers of the Coast, the effect was well below par:

‘The blocks themselves are good’ wrote Clifford. ‘We give bad marks only for the ineffective filtering of the sky in the blue block. But the honest-to-goodness ability to mix inks and match a colour, and especially the tone of a colour, is lacking. When, as in this design, we have tried to do with 3 colours what used to be done with 4, it is imperative that the exact colours of the original should be matched. Both blue and yellow are far too weak…If it really worries you, have white let in round the leaf – but only on the blue block, and as we have indicated, there, not as the mechanical line the blockmaker has so very improperly added to the original.’

Clifford Ellis. Unpublished letter to Raleigh Trevelyan, 9 April 1952

The blockmaker did his best, but the result was still a mess, the leaves of the sea-bindweed plant being all but invisible and the sky seemingly laden with smog. This was also the last jacket (with the exception of Sea-Birds which had been printed earlier) to bear the pretty individual symbols which the Ellises had been designing since 1944. ‘We have decided that it would probably be best to have a general New Naturalist colophon instead,’ wrote Raleigh Trevelyan by way of explanation in May 1951, ‘instead of a special one for each book.’ He gave no reason for this regrettable decision, but it was probably another cost-cutting exercise. The customary date was also now omitted from the designs since the jacket of Mushrooms and Toadstools, printed in 1953, had embarrassingly included the date of its design: 1945!

There was a fuss over the jackets of both the next titles, The Weald and Dartmoor, since neither conveyed the spring-like freshness which Collins wanted, though Raleigh Trevelyan admitted that the former ‘certainly grows on one…after all the hard things I have said about it’. But the sales department objected to the Dartmoor jacket on the grounds that it presented a distant view and was too gloomy, failing to meet the ‘hit-you-in-the-eye’ requirements of the trade. Falling sales of the New Naturalist titles meant that the jackets were becoming ‘a real advertising factor’. They therefore requested some foreground animals to bring good cheer. ‘But what would sell Dartmoor?’ asked Clifford. ‘Most visitors come by car and view it from the car or from a motor coach. Hence we didn’t do a close-up.’ But in deference to the sales people, the clapper bridge was moved up slightly more to the front of the design.

The problem lay partly in the printing method, partly in the reduced colour range. There was in fact a world of difference between working with four colours and working with three. Of the first 20 titles, all but Britain’s Structure and Scenery and Life in Lakes and Rivers had been printed in four colours. But of the main series titles between No 21 British Mammals and No 50 Pesticides and Pollution, the majority are in three colours only. For The Greenshank jacket the Ellises had even experimented with two, relying on a scribble of line to provide additional texture and tone (that technique was also used, rather more successfully, for An Angler’s Entomology). Colour limitations may be one reason why many of these later jackets are in darker tones with a black title band. For Pesticides and Pollution, the Ellises had initially designed the colourful jacket depicted on Plate 9, depending on a remarkable range of two and threefold overprinting to squeeze a rainbow of colours from only three inks. However, this was rejected by the printers presumably because it was too complicated. The adopted design in only two colours presents an apocalyptic vision of smoke and spray in a dark sinister landscape awash with pollutants. It works on its own terms, but it is more appropriate to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring than Kenneth Mellanby’s sober and objective text, and, in any case, is far from what the Ellises originally intended.

In the four-year delay between Pesticides and the next book, Man and Birds, Clifford Ellis and the natural history editor Michael Walter worked out a new way of printing the jackets using colour separations rather than coloured artwork. The new approach was necessitated by ‘economies in block-making with subsequent difficulties’, but it did at least allow the artists to revert to a norm of four colours and inaugurate the series of bright and beautiful jackets produced by C & RE in the 1970s. The process was helped by the availability of improved semi-transparent printing inks in a much wider range of tones, and the artists could now choose between transparent and opaque inks. Moreover, they were now able to devote more time to their designs, having retired from full-time teaching. The snag with using colour separations of black on white was that no one could see the full glory of the picture until the block had been made and the printer’s proof run off. The visible artwork is no more than patches of black paint on white paper with the Pantone number pencilled below. Clifford compared the business of ‘seeing the picture’ with that of reading the music score of a quartet. Even the accompanying colour sketch can give no more than an impression of the finished jacket since it was painted with opaque pigments, while the jacket is printed in more lucid, transparent inks. From Man and Birds onwards, then, there is no ‘finished artwork’ to exhibit and frame. The picture is the jacket itself.

The jackets designed by C & RE between Man and Birds (1971) and Inheritance and Natural History (1977) are surely among the peaks of their craft. Only a master of colour could have created the aqueous jacket of British Seals, or the gay colours of Finches against a flat print-like background, or the superb looming Ant in its grassblade jungle. More jackets were designed during this period than were actually used. Many expected titles were, for one reason or another, never completed. Moreover the brand new jackets prepared for planned new editions of Insect Natural History, Mushrooms and Toadstools and The World of Plankton were also wasted since Collins had decided after all not to reprint them. Colour separations exist for some of these titles, but because printers proofs were never made, and are expensive to produce, we may never see them in their full glory. The colour sketches reproduced for the first time on Plates 12 and 14 can give only an indication of what we have missed by the non-appearance of Waysides, Lichens, Seaweeds and Ponds, Puddles and Protozoa.

Artists’ pencil outline and printed jacket of Man and Birds (1971), the first to be prepared from the artists’ colour separations.

If the last Ellis covers from British Tits (1979) to The Natural History of Orkney (1985) fail to match the dizzy heights of their immediate predecessors it is less the fault of the artists than the editors: too many birds and beasts, for which a repetition of motifs was perhaps inevitable. Neither does the thick plastic wrapper in which these books are indelibly sealed work to their advantage. And as for the laminated jacket of Reptiles and Amphibians, wholly unsuited to the surface texture of the lithographic print, we must avert our eyes and be thankful for glories past. The design for Orkney was the result of an expedition to Orkney by Clifford and Rosemary in 1983, during which they drew from life the native North Ronaldsay sheep feeding on seaweed at low tide. The jacket contains a characteristic Ellis device, the title band cutting two planes of view, so that beyond the scene of sheep munching weed lies a distant view of the Orkney coast: terns in flight over an intricate pattern of rock and water. As usual, a vital part of the design – the curling horn of the ram – spills over onto the spine of the jacket. Unfortunately this cannot be seen on the paperback copies of the title which were given plain spines. This was the last of the Ellis jackets. After a short illness, Clifford died in 1985 before he and Rosemary could begin work on the next title, British Warblers. Rosemary was invited to continue alone, but she declined to do so in a graceful and charming letter to the then natural history editor, Crispin Fisher. The Ellis jackets were the work of a husband-and-wife partnership, and with Clifford’s death the partnership must cease. To her, Crispin had written that ‘you and Clifford have been part of my upbringing…His death marks the end of an era. Your work has a freshness and quality as modern today as it was 43 years ago – and that can’t be said for any other graphic designer I know.’

Jacket of British Seals (1974).

Postscript: the Gillmor jackets

The Ellises were a hard act to follow. It was the unenviable task of the natural history editor, Crispin Fisher, to find either an artist who could produce work in a similar spirit, or to change the design of the New Naturalist jackets altogether, perhaps using colour photographs. He would have had some justification for taking the latter course. Because of rising costs and falling sales, he had been forced to switch the main production from hardback to paperback, leaving a small edition of casebound New Naturalist books for the hard core of collectors who would buy them at almost any price. Most of the new paperbacks were to be given photographic wrappers. To the gratitude of New Naturalist admirers everywhere, Crispin decided to maintain the hardbacks in the Ellis tradition. He does not seem to have hesitated long in his choice of an artist. As a fellow bird artist, Crispin had known Robert Gillmor for many years, and admired his combination of accuracy and liveliness, as well as his habit of sketching from life. Robert told me that he was nervous of accepting, ‘but Crispin Fisher was persuasive ..... I am most interested in the Ellises work and enormously admired their NN covers from the first – never thinking I could ever follow in their footsteps.’

Robert Gillmor is, of course, one of this country’s most prolific and successful bird artists. He has illustrated shelves of books and bird magazines during the past 35 years, and his meticulously observed watercolours always find a ready market. He is a remarkably versatile artist, having used a wide range of materials to capture the essence of a bird, most characteristically with ink and brush, but also with silk screens, lino cuts and other more experimental techniques. Some of his watercolours are painted in the hide, by watching the bird with one eye and the sketch pad with the other. At home in Reading, he works in equally cramped surroundings in a shed in the garden, piled high with magazines, box files and artistic impedimenta of all kinds. In recent years, he and his wife, the landscape artist Susan Norman, have held successful joint exhibitions in East Anglia, whose shores are the base for many of Robert’s watercolours of gulls, terns and avocets.

It must have been a daunting task, designing a jacket which would sit harmoniously on the same shelf as the Ellis jackets, and knowing that a small army of book collectors would be inspecting your work very critically indeed. Wisely, I think, Robert Gillmor did not attempt to emulate the Ellises’ style but by using the same technique of colour separations and overlapping colours he succeeded in producing jacket designs that sit on the shelf with their forebears without serious disharmony. The texture of Gillmor’s work is quite different, however, perhaps reflecting his background in book illustration rather than that of the Ellises in posters and art education. Combining line and colour, and the occasional use of textured paper, he has produced some quite brilliant results, like the rocky background of Caves and Cave Life or the tree trunks on The New Forest jacket. Like the Ellises, he has become expert at exploiting colour overlaps, and perhaps few would tell at a glance that he is limited to only three colours (plus black). For sheer virtuosity, the Heathlands jacket is remarkable in managing to create three birds, three flowers, a butterfly and a sand lizard, all in reasonably lifelike colours, with such a restricted palette.

The nature of Gillmor’s designs is to a large extent suggested by the title of the book: some demand landscapes, others require recognisable close-ups of birds, flowers and fish. With his first jacket, British Warblers, his intention was to produce a simple bold pattern suggestive of life in the tree-tops, using areas of solid colour (on the paperback the effect is spoiled by the omission of the female blackcap peeping round the spine). The New Forest called for a different approach. Robert told me he sketched the rugged old trees from life during a day in the Forest, and had a lot of fun mixing the colours, obtaining two tones of green for the leaves, and suitably coloured tree trunks by mixing blue with orange! On the whole, I think Robert Gillmor’s style lends itself best to the use of contrasting textures and strong designs. The jacket of Ferns is surely his masterpiece so far. The bold and varied patterns of the ferns themselves are ideal for lithography, and the combination of their browns and greens against a uniformly textured background is irresistible. When the artist aims for closer realism, as with the horseshoe bat on Caves and Cave Life, or the various birds on British Larks, Pipits and Wagtails, the effect seems to me less successful, though in the case of the bird titles it is hard to imagine an alternative (though the jacket of The Hebrides is very successful at combining birds and a seascape).

Once the final design has been worked out, Robert Gillmor draws the line artwork and the blocks of colour on separate sheets of transparent plastic, overlaying the design. These elements can then be combined to check that they register accurately. Before this stage is reached he will have produced a colour sketch of the envisaged design, which is sent to the author for comment. This often results in minor amendments: the omission of a second mole on The Soil, or of a trellis above the garden gate in Wild and Garden Plants in order to reveal more meadow beyond; or a discussion with Colin Tubbs about the exact colouring of fallow deer in late summer. The original design for Freshwater Fishes, featuring trout with water crowfoot flowers, was replaced because it gave the false impression that this was an angling book. Niall Campbell, one of the authors, suggested the theme of the replacement design: ‘a selection of fish, coarse and game, either as a mixed or varied group ..... a sinister pike hovering behind a group of small colourful fishes. Something like that.’ The sticklebacks of Freshwater Fishes were certainly colourful – more like guppies than sticklebacks – but, if one accepts, as did Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, that the job of a book jacket is to produce a distinctive, interesting image, not a coloured diagram, then their departure from strict accuracy hardly matters.

His series of eleven New Naturalist jackets so far (not counting the one surrounding this book) has surely established Robert Gillmor as a worthy successor of the Ellises. The New Naturalist hardbacks still gleam in the bookshops (when they are allowed to do so) as well as ever they did; or perhaps even more so, now that the art of dust jacket design has elsewhere been all but eclipsed by glossy, unimaginative pictures created by the camera.