The dust jacket of Butterflies must be one of the best-known images in the world of natural history publishing – so familiar in fact that it is hard to recapture how unusual it must have seemed when the book was first put on sale in November 1945. For those used to more conventional book jackets, this design, in which the caterpillar is so much more prominent than the adult butterfly, both conveyed in terms of form and colour rather than strict scientific fidelity, must have raised a few eyebrows. C&RE’s first jacket design certainly helped to underline the ‘new’ in New Naturalist.
The prototype of the Butterflies jacket was a painting of September 1944. Twice the size of the printed jacket, the artists used gouache and watercolour paint on thick, rough-surfaced watercolour paper. At this stage the Ellises probably did not know that they would be restricted to four colours (including black).
Later the design was redrawn to the same size as the printed jacket in response to recommended printing requirements. Completed by January 1945, C&RE made a number of modifications, bringing the butterflies closer and making more of the distant trees and windmill. The blue was deepened to enable the title lettering to show more clearly. Perhaps few readers would have spotted that the orange colour enclosing the book’s number is the caterpillar’s defensive organ, known as an osmeterium.
William Collins had ‘asked a great many people about this jacket. He likes the original rough and the smaller redrawing of it’, Ruth Atkinson went on, ‘but has received a good deal of criticism at your using a Swallow-Tail which is a very rare butterfly in England I am told. He would like you to do the design again, using another butterfly – possibly the Dark Green Fretillary [sic]. Mr Collins hates to ask you to begin all over again but as we are quite definitely not using the design you finally submitted, I think it might be easier to suggest a third alternative for this title’ (RA to CE, 8.2.45).
The first submitted design for Butterflies with hand lettering on watercolour paper by C&RE, 1944. It is drawn half as large again as the printed jacket (37.2 x 31 cm).
Later jackets of Butterflies were printed using a screen to deepen the colours.
For the published jacket the Ellises made the butterflies and distant scene more prominent and redesigned the spine and colophon.
It seems, then, that there were three versions of the jacket design for the first New Naturalist, the original rough, the modified design drawn at jacket size, and a third version with the fritillary that C&RE produced and sent to Collins by February 1945. By then, however, Billy Collins had changed his mind and decided to stick with the Swallowtail design after all. He was now ‘absolutely happy’ about the jacket, and commented that he had personally ‘always liked the Swallow-Tail, and I hope you will do this. I do not think that the criticism of its being rather rare matters,’ he added, ‘and I do not think one could get anything more lovely’ (wc to CE, 16.2.45). ‘We are rather keen to get this design as soon as possible’, he went on, ‘as it is ahead of the other MSS in production’. Four days later, Ruth Atkinson was thanking Clifford for ‘the finished design for Butterflies … I like it very much and am delighted to have it so quickly and am sending it off to Mr Griffits today’ (RA to CE, 20.2.45).
The modified design was in four colours, blue, yellow, orange and black, with shades of green produced by overlaps. White was let in by leaving the appropriate areas blank. Clifford was disappointed by the proof: the blue was not deep enough for the white title lettering to stand out distinctly, the greys and greens were insufficiently distinct, and the yellow had come out too orange. Not all these faults were overcome on the printed jacket. Nonetheless, Ruth expressed herself ‘extremely pleased’ by it, and Billy Collins felt ‘more pleased than ever with the wrapper now I see it on a book’ (wc to CE, 5.6.45).
The Butterflies jacket was, in effect, a trial run. The initial problems with the printing were never fully overcome, and the effect is somewhat tentative and wishy-washy. In 1962, the printers decided to deepen the colours, especially the blue of the title band, by using a screening process, but the result was to cast a greyish smog over the whole design, making the jacket look rather grubby. But what mattered far more was the impact of the design: the first Ellis jacket proclaimed that these books were different: serious, modern, grown-up, challenging, new. For that message the last thing anyone wanted was another pretty butterfly on another pretty flower.
Richard Lewington, the wildlife illustrator, writes: ‘For the jacket of a book about British butterflies the Swallowtail is a prime candidate as a subject. It’s large, rare and most people would recognise it, even if they had never seen one patrolling the Norfolk Broads. Its bold markings make it the butterfly equivalent of the avocet or the giant panda. The graphic image on the jacket of Butterflies is, however, surprising in that it is the equally striking caterpillar that takes centre stage, with the two butterflies in flight confined to the middle distance. To add colour and drama, the caterpillar’s orange osmeterium, used to scare predators, is inflated. I like the balance of the design, which also gives a hint of the butterfly’s habitat with the windmill in the distance, but feel the spine lets it down. It is too abstract and gives no clue as to the subject matter of the book.’
It was probably the striking jacket of British Game that settled the argument about whether to use photographs or artwork for the New Naturalist dust jackets. On 7 December 1944, William Collins professed himself ‘absolutely delighted with the partridge for British Game. I think it is quite lovely in every way’ (wc to CE, 7.12.44). He was commenting on the artists’ ‘rough’, twice the size of the printed jacket and against a grey background. On the finished design, sent in on 24 January, the artists substituted ‘umber brown’ for grey. Collins preferred the rough and hoped that they ‘would some day … be able to use the original colour scheme on another design’.
This is a bolder, more confident jacket than Butterflies. An approximately life-size English partridge dominates the scene, its head twisted back above the title band, perhaps in tribute to the old masters of bird portraiture who showed large birds in this awkward attitude in order to fit them on the plate without reduction. The partridge is running towards the spine over an open down, its body language and alert eye (beautifully observed) suggesting alarm. Several birds in its covey have already taken off – wispy, almost abstract shapes on the left front and spine – and our bird will doubtless follow them shortly. The glory of the design lies in the colours: the ochre, terracotta and pale grey create a sepia-tinted landscape, a timeless vision of the old England of rolling hills, hedgerows, weed-fringed arable fields and abundant game that, in the immediate postwar period, might have caused a twinge of nostalgia.
Copies of the jacket exist where the design has been mistakenly repeated on the back against an umber background. Possibly they were rejects brought in for the last remaining stocks of British Game in the late 1950s or 1960s to avoid the expense of printing a new batch.
This jacket gave Collins the idea of a ‘big illustration-book of individual birds on the lines of Gould’ which he wanted James Fisher to write and Clifford Ellis to illustrate. He was still talking about it a month after the jacket was accepted, and a month is a long time in publishing.
Artwork for British Game, 1945. The hand-lettered title and colophon were designed separately and combined by the printer.
The anonymous designer of the jacket of London’s Birds, 1949, by the same author, borrowed C&RE’s idea of juxtaposing seagulls and the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.
The first design for London’s Natural History (originally titled Natural History of London), completed by October 1944, featured ducks on a pond. William Collins liked it and preferred it to the Butterflies jacket (at the time he had said of the latter, ‘nothing could be more lovely’; evidently it could). Soon afterwards C&RE produced a new version, keeping the idea of reflections in water, but substituting a livelier bird: a gull. The duck lived on inside the oval on the spine on the NN logo.
London’s Natural History needed an image that said, clearly and unambiguously: London. C&RE found it in the dome of St Paul’s, an icon of the City’s suffering during the Blitz, only four years previously. But instead of the actual dome they showed its reflection in water, possibly just a puddle, possibly the River Thames (bombing and house clearance would just about have made that possible in 1945). Everyone liked the design, but, wrote Ruth Atkinson on 8 February 1945, ‘Both Mr Huxley and Mr Fisher … would like you to include the crescent which appears behind the bird’s eye. This I understand will turn it into a black headed gull, which they think very suitable.’
The design allowed the artists to create interesting watery effects, with flying gulls reflected in the ripples as flickers of white. The jacket is beautifully printed in soft browns and greys, with the only bright colour, red, reserved for the bird’s bill, legs and eye; it also gave the artists a sufficiently deep tone for the title band. C&RE repeated this trick the following year with Natural History in the Highlands and Islands. Unfortunately some of the subtlety of the design is lost once the jacket’s spine becomes faded. Our image, taken from a proof jacket, is a reminder of what it was like originally.
The colour range of most of these 1940s designs is deliberately limited. In today’s stores they might have a retro appeal, but in the austerity bookshops of postwar Britain they attracted the buyer’s eye; at least 20,000 copies of London’s Natural History were sold in 1945. Like the books themselves, these jackets were eyecatching, contemporary and rather daring.
Britain’s Structure and Scenery – or, as per the title band, ‘BRITAIN’S Structure & Scenery’ – is Dudley Stamp’s account of the physical structure of the British Isles. His working title, The Build and Building of the British Isles, provides a better sense of the book’s main themes: the rocks that underlie and shape the land, and the way mankind has subsequently moulded the landscape. Dashed off in the textbook style in which he was so accomplished, Dudley Stamp’s book was a great success; its use in schools, colleges and libraries made it the surprise bestseller of the series with 62,000 hardback copies sold, plus many more as Fontana paperbacks.
Structure & Scenery is densely illustrated with landscapes from a lost wartime Britain with minor roads snaking through what were then known as beauty spots without a sign or a car in sight. The artists were normally sent the first chapter and its accompanying illustrations, and the one that might have given them an idea for a jacket is Plate II, a black-and-white aerial view of the chalk coast of Dorset, with the sea stack of Old Harry rock in the foreground. c&re’s design is not Old Harry, though it is made of chalk. It is, rather, a surreal rock of their imagination which seems to metamorphose into a half-completed classical monument: ‘build and building’ all in one. The artists were interested in the way objects change shape when viewed from a different angle, and to this phantasmagoric rock they added a chalk cliff viewed from above which runs along the spine, with white touches indicating gulls flying up. Extraneous detail is sacrificed for a simple, strong image that says what needs to be said. And, as usual, c&re’s sense of colour is impeccable: by letting in a lot of white, the design needs no more than a cool blue, grey and buff, with overlaps to create depth and shadow.
Unlike the first three, this design was approved without modification, apart from the hand-lettered title which was changed at the last minute after Dudley Stamp had had second thoughts about Build and Building. The oval colophon has one of the Ellises’ least successful mini-drawings, strata underlying a notional landscape, like a slice of sponge cake.
Colour design sketch for Wild Flowers in gouache and watercolour on layout paper with pencil notes (25 x 20 cm).
The original jacket for Wild Flowers, by John Gilmour alone and designed in 1945, was based on arrowhead lily leaves and flowers. A few copies of this jacket were printed by Baynards, but they were never used.
Wild Flowers was originally scheduled for publication in 1946, and, in that expectation, it was among the first batch of titles for which C&RE designed jackets. The then solo author, John Gilmour (he was also a member of the New Naturalist committee) had suggested two possible designs: a riverbank scene with arrowhead lilies and ragged robin or lords-and-ladies, or a woodland glade carpeted with bluebells, red campions and wild garlic. ‘These three plants,’ he commented, ‘are very typical of many woods in late spring, and would I think make a good design.’
We discovered the artwork for the 1945 ‘Gilmour jacket’ in the Collins archive, evidently lost for many years because it had not been catalogued. The artists had fastened on Gilmour’s suggestion of the arrowhead lily, evidently admiring the bold forms of its leaves and the contrasting white, purple-centred flowers, the shape of the clubs in a pack of playing cards. Gilmour had a few criticisms: ‘He feels the leaf should not bulge,’ noted Ruth Atkinson. ‘He is also not sure whether or not there are buds in the right-hand corner, and feels they are too large.’ Gilmour and Billy Collins also thought that ‘the side of the jacket is not as good as the jacket and spine seen together, and would like to have more flowers on the side’ (RA to C ?, 26.7.45). The jacket was proofed and a copy survives to show us what the book would have looked like had it been published in 1946 instead of nearly a decade later. But Gilmour was overworked and unable to finish the book himself. It was not until he was joined by his Cambridge colleague, Max Walters, that Wild Flowers was completed and published in 1954. By then the series already had four botanical titles, British Plant Life, Wild Flowers of Chalk & Limestone, Wild Orchids and Flowers of the Coast, with a fifth, Mountain Flowers, just around the corner. Hence a new jacket was needed which C&RE were asked to make ‘more striking than the original’(R? to ce, 13.3.53).
The artwork for a new jacket (with part of the title and the imprint stuck on) was designed eight years later. c&re also provided hand-lettered artwork for the title (see page 45), but the printed jacket substitutes machine lettering.
After some experiment they designed a clump of primroses framed by trees, with a lake and a green hill rising in the background. The brilliant flowers sing out from their shadowy dell as if lit by a shaft of sunshine. The design uses two yellow colours, one of them ‘primrose’ to match the petals of that flower as exactly as possible. At first glance the tree trunks seem to merge into the black title band, but there is in fact a subtle difference in their respective tones. The spine shows two more woodland flowers, celandine and wood anemone, along with the primrose. The design is simple, clever and striking, although some might have found it unexpectedly dark for a book about wild flowers.
Hand-lettering and colophon for Wild Flowers by C&RE. By the time the book was published, they had passed out of favour.
Revised and renamed the Highlands & Islands by F. Fraser Darling and Morton Boyd, 1964.
The jacket of the revised edition published in 1964 and retitled The Highlands & Islands, differs in various details, most notably in the absence of the antler on the colophon.
Many of the New Naturalist jackets designed in the immediate postwar period depend on a single bright colour among soft, subdued tones. The powerful jacket of Natural History in the Highlands and Islands is a good example. The artists chose a Black-throated Diver as a suitable living symbol of the wild and solitary spaces of northern Scotland. The bird’s strange appearance and black-and-white plumage also made it a striking subject. Having made the diver fill most of the available space, its head turned back in the same manner as the partridge on British Game, the rest of the design could be sketched in. There is no detail, only blotchy browns and dark greys suggesting rocks, and the lighter tones the light shimmering over the water. No more is necessary. The diver carries all before it. Simplex munditiis (‘elegant in simplicity’).
The use of colour on this jacket is confident to the point of bravery. With everything else in black, grey and bistre-brown, C&RE confined the only solid bright colour, a biologically accurate maroon, to the diver’s eye, which lies at the exact optical centre of the jacket. A delicate stippling of the maroon ink forms a pinkish flush on the diver’s chin. Its mate, reflected in the still water, paddles on the spine, above the oval containing a stag’s antler.
For the 1964 revised edition the book was given a new title, The Highlands & Islands (by Darling and Boyd). The jacket of the new edition is brighter overall and the bird’s head paler due to the substitution of buff for grey. And on the oval, the stag’s antler has ‘gang awa’.
Sketch of mushroom gills used as the basis of the spine of the jacket.
This is one of C&RE’s more experimental designs. Clifford had made a series of pencil studies of mushrooms, puffballs and other fungi, and he and Rosemary chose some of these to combine into a collage of textures and tones. The result is a kind of essence of ‘fungosity’, with the wavy and swirling shapes of fungal gills contrasted with the bulging form of a puffball and the indented stem of a False Morel, Helvella crispa. The artists decided against projecting the design on to the spine, finding it more effective to reproduce a mushroom’s gills to provide a suitably fungussy effect.
Both publishers and author were pleased with the design which, they thought, caught ‘the atmosphere of the book’. The main concern was the date of 1945 in the lower right-hand corner. C&RE had designed it in that year when publication had seemed imminent. But no one had allowed for the author John Ramsbottom’s seemingly unlimited aptitude for procrastination. His impossibly long text had to be pruned right down, and then, at the last minute, the editors asked him to write an extra chapter about penicillin. Hence, like Wild Flowers, this book came out eight years after the date on the jacket. This was the reason why the artists were asked not to date their designs in future.
As usual, the jacket was printed by lithography at Baynard Press. Jackets for later editions of this long-running title were printed on whiter paper. When it came to the last reprint, in 1977, the original artwork could not be found, and so the printer quietly photographed an old jacket and hoped for the best. The result was a travesty.
That year C&RE designed a brand-new, more colourful jacket for the book with puffballs and magpie caps on a slightly surreal pink background. This was one of the few jackets Charlotte Ellis remembered seeing in preparation, with fresh-gathered magpie caps laid out on paper ready to draw. Sadly the new jacket was never printed; instead, the book, like so many other classic titles, was allowed to go out of print.
Artwork for Mushrooms & Toadstools in four colours with pencilled printing notes and marks where it had been gummed to the plate.
Details of wing structure from the pencil sketch.
Detail from the sketch showing head, thorax and part of the abdomen.
The striking jacket of Insect Natural History was designed in late 1945. Because this book would largely omit butterflies and moths to focus on less well-known insects, C&RE chose instead a dragonfly. The Ellises were clearly fascinated by the textures of an adult dragonfly, the veined wings, like leaded glass, the intricate exoskeleton, the bristly legs and the huge bulging eyes. A large pencil drawing offers some insight into the way the jacket was designed. Over it, Clifford had ruled intersecting square and diagonal lines probably for the purposes of transposing the design to the size of the printed jacket. He also added many pencilled annotations for the colours: the abdominal segments were to be ‘pale green’; other parts sepia, chrome or ‘soft edged as seen through gelatin’. The wings were to be ‘slightly paler and lighter but not white’. A second colour sketch on thick watercolour paper tries out the effect of the colours, and both would be used to guide the completed artwork.
The printed jacket is a showcase of visual effects: the marbling of the rock, the interplay of reflected light on the wings, the refracted shine on the dragonfly’s eye. A close-up of three more abdominal plates, seen from a different angle, make up the spine, one of them enclosing the oval which contains not another dragonfly but a grasshopper. The title is exquisitely hand-lettered.
Insect Natural History was among the second batch of jacket designs sent to Collins on 9 October 1945. ‘The New Naturalist committee have now seen the jackets’, wrote Ruth Atkinson, ‘and I am told like them very much indeed. So does everyone else. I am delighted with them and feel very god-motherly about them’ (RA to CE, 9.8.45).
Nearly a quarter century later, after the original ‘plant’ for the jacket had been lost, C&RE were asked to design another for an expected new edition, which they completed by October 1979. Unfortunately the book was not reprinted and so the new jacket, now seemingly lost, was never used.
Pencil study for the jacket on layout paper with grid and pencil notes (44.5 x 54.4 cm).
A Country Parish was the New Naturalist library’s tribute to The Natural History of Selborne. Like its great predecessor, it combined natural history with accounts of the physical and historical aspects of the parish, together with short digressions about village characters, local dialect and quaint customs. Written in the 1940s it can be read now as a portrait of a rural village before cars, television and supermarkets swept away many of the age-old rustic traditions of country life.
The problem for the jacket was how to convey the idea of a parish. While only a map could show us what a parish is, c&re found an appropriate symbol for a village community on the very first of the book’s 32 colour plates: Great Budworth church with its brass weathervane. The church lies at the heart, physically and spiritually, of a parish, where swifts often nest in the eaves and bats hang in the rafters. The weathervane on the church tower or spire is an even more effective symbol for a book about natural history because it unites the parish with the physical elements of wind and weather. c&re’s weathercock is a strange thing, stained and covered in green verdigris, aloft amid a whirly-go-round of swallows: a man-made bird among real ones. This is a sky scene rendered in appropriately cool dove-greys and lavenders. A contrasting blue-green band bearing the hand-lettered title completes the design.
This was perhaps the most unusual design so far, and seems to have come as a surprise. Ruth Atkinson’s reaction was, ‘Yes, but … The idea is fresh, so needs imagination.’ It is also one of the least familiar – A Country Parish went out of print towards the end of the 1950s and has never been reprinted.
Artwork for A Country Parish, no longer bearing a date.
The choice of a sea-cliff setting for this jacket might seem an odd one considering that Flowers of the Coast and The Sea Coast were both in active preparation and had a better claim to it. The choice was not the artists’ but the publishers’. ‘It has been decided that the plant to be depicted is Sea Campion on shingle or cliff’ wrote Ruth Atkinson (RA to C?, 7.10.46). The book’s author, W.B. Turrill, had written a book about the Bladder Campion and its close relative, the Sea Campion, and his work on their ecology, cytology and genetics features strongly in the text. Clearly Turrill wanted the jacket to reflect that fact. British Plant Life embodied the new botany of the postwar era, no longer dominated by classification and plant anatomy but reaching into the uncharted waters of microbiology and the light it shed on plant relationships. As the editors expressed it, such work was ‘a signpost pointing towards a fuller and deeper knowledge of our flora and we hope that many will be encouraged to follow the road to which it points.’
For this unusually tight brief, C&RE designed a cliff scene, probably because it suited a vertical format better than a beach or shingle bank. A headland resembling The Needles in the Isle of Wight made a satisfying composition, leaving the flowers to dominate the foreground, with one of them leaning over onto the spine. The campions are carefully and accurately drawn with delicately veined calyces, dark stamens and paired waxy leaves. The colours are soft and cool: mauve, blue-green and pale grey, using overlaps for the shadows. C&RE chose a contrasting plant for the oval, a frond of Hart’s-tongue Fern.
The Mountains & Moorlands jacket was among a batch commissioned in late 1946, and completed early the following year. It is notable both for its stark and tangled shapes and the choice of colours – subdued greys and ochre-oranges with a sparing use of the same bright magenta as in The Highlands and Islands. James Fisher considered it to be a particularly beautiful design but was intrigued by the choice of a moth to represent the wilder British uplands. Was there ‘a special reason for choosing a moth?’ asked a member of the Collins team, Constance Yates. Clifford’s reply does not survive, but read on.
Tim Bernhard is a graphic designer, wildlife artist and book collector who currently runs the New Naturalists Collectors Club. Mountains & Moorlands was the first jacketed New Naturalist he came to own, and it sowed the seeds of his passion for wildlife art. He writes:
‘This is a four-colour design. There is a lovely bright golden-ochre which features on the title band and the spine, and also on the body and wings of the Emperor moth. A sort of olive-greenish-grey is used for the sky and foreground. Then there is black, which brings the design into focus, and introduces power and depth. And finally there is a rich, deep magenta which, when printed over the black, softens and warms the landscape. It is also used to great effect on the wings of the moth, the bell heather flowers and the book number.
A second Emperor moth on the spine is more abstract than its mate on the cover, but retains enough detail to be recognisable; I love the use of the same moth for the colophon. I have lived with this jacket for thirty years, and I am still impressed by C&RE’s bleak, harsh landscape, a desolate moor just before a storm, with the strong, twisting branches of the heather giving movement and vitality to the design. By contrast the moths are soft and textured with downy fur and velvety markings. It is a striking, unexpected and rather moving interpretation of a vulnerable creature in a harsh environment, and it is not only one of my favourite New Naturalist covers but, in my opinion, one of the best book jackets there has ever been.’
Artwork for Mountains & Moorlands with part of printer’s instructions added in pencil.
C&RE’s original design for The Sea Shore used a khaki tone to suggest a beach on which a crab’s claw lies bleaching and half-buried in the sand. They were not satisfied with it and tried another version substituting greyish-green for khaki which made a better contrast with the pink of the claw and suggested a rock encrusted with barnacles and limpets. The artists clearly had fun with the shapes and textures of the image, and the result is arresting, the grittiness of the background suggested by blotches of black and white, thus focusing attention on that massive claw. The spine shows another crab fragment, the paddle-like hind-leg of a swimming crab.
The Sea Shore, like most of the early jackets, was first printed by lithography, and later by letterpress. The design, along with that of The Badger, was included in a National Book League Exhibition of British book jackets at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1949. Many other Ellis jackets were similarly exhibited in future years.
Nick Baker, the naturalist and broadcaster, writes:
‘This design is one of my favourites, partly because the subject strikes me as a little dark and disturbing. To see one of the book’s subjects dismembered on the front cover is in itself a little unusual: imagine, if you will, what the jacket of Dragonflies might look like with the shattered panes and torn panels of its wings, the post-predation wreckage caused by a spider or bird (actually I quite like this idea now I’ve thought about it!), or the disjointed and mangled limbs of the rabbit on British Mammals. Yet for some reason it was fine to have bits of crab scattered hither and thither on the jacket of The Sea Shore by C.M. Yonge. Whether this is a maimed or simply a moulted crab doesn’t really matter. The jacket did the trick for me, as a proto-naturalist on a family holiday to the Isle of Wight, when finding the distinctive hind-leg of a Velvet Crab drew my eye to the spine of The Sea Shore in a secondhand bookshop in Ventnor. The image encapsulated for me the mysteries of the shore that I was exploring daily, the hardships of this harsh environment, and, of course, the trail of delight for any naturalist who visits the shore.
Snowdonia was among a planned series of ‘regional’ titles on the newly opened National Parks and other areas of distinctive scenery rich in wildlife. In each case the plan was for a team of experts, under a senior editor, to contribute sections of the book from their specialised viewpoints, mixing natural history with land use, rocks and landforms, and cultural life to produce a composite portrait of a region. In practice this was far too ambitious; none of the published titles fully realise that concept, and some were never completed. Snowdonia is the closest the series came to the original conception. Though it is subtitled ‘The National Park of North Wales’, the book was published before the Park was declared and its boundaries agreed: a somewhat hazardous proceeding.
William Collins wanted the regional books to ‘look different from the New Naturalists and yet be enough alike for people to have some linked feeling.’ A photographic jacket was considered but, for the moment, rejected (it would raise its ugly head again in the 1960s). Instead, the Ellises were asked to produce something akin to a travel poster, a landscape simplified into its basic geometry and reproducible in a limited range of colours.
The jacket shows an elemental scene of rock, snow and water without relieving detail. Windswept boulders and snow mark the steep ascent above a mountain lake. The deep-blue of the mountain lake is matched by a stormy sky, while crags and hollows are suggested in soft greys. This is probably intended to be a view of Snowdon itself, with the llyn or lake of Glaslyn lying below its distinctively domed summit. The title band is narrower than usual and is not coloured. The colophon is a National Trust-style oak leaf. The design was completed by January 1947 and was well-received. c&re were, however, asked not to date the jackets in future, since the book was published in November 1949, and not in 1947 as on the jacket.
Perhaps because the book lacks a senior editor (it is really three separate books in one) the jacket omits the authors’ names. Their names appear on the binding of some copies but not on others.
To the regret of New Naturalist collectors ever since, The Art of Botanical Illustration was denied an Ellis jacket. The plain colophon was designed by c&re but the rest of the jacket did not involve them. The Board minutes state baldly that an Ellis wrapper ‘would not be suitable for this book’. It seems that the decision was taken internally and was not up for discussion. As a result, although everything else, from the binding to the paper quality, is in the usual New Naturalist style, the jacket gives this book a semi-detached look.
In place of the usual design is a framed print taken from the book, a painting of roses by Johann Walther of Strasbourg within a buff background (the original is in the Victoria and Albert Museum). The spine makes do with a drawing of a lily by R.G. Hatton inside an oval; the delicate buff tone tends to deepen over time to an unpleasing burnt umber.
Full size pencil design for Life in Lakes & Rivers on layout paper and the published jacket.
One of the authors, T.T. Macan, had some very specific suggestions for the jacket of what was then called Britain’s Lakes and Rivers. He asked for ‘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 menacing in the background, and some plants, and some reeds’ (conveyed to CE by Ruth Atkinson, 15.12.48). C &RE kept surprisingly close to the spirit, if not the letter, of this daunting brief.
They had an idea of their own to offer. The book’s themes of freshwater life and man’s impact on this environment could be linked by a fish and a fisherman. But rather than revealing the fisherman himself, it would be sufficient to show part of his tackle, in this case a float. And the title band could divide the watery world of fish from the man’s-eye view of the river with its road bridge and tumbling weir. The various elements that Macan suggested are thus integrated nicely in one of the most imaginative of the Ellis designs.
But it created a technical problem. The design called for two shades of green with which darker tones could be made by overlapping them with grey. Baynard Press experienced difficulty getting the colours exactly right, though in the end they obtained a passable result by adjusting the grey, which appears as a pure tone only on the bridge. At some point the printers traced a pencil line around the perch on the artwork. In a note which betrays the casualness with which C&RE’s original artwork was treated, the editor claimed the jacket of a later edition of the book was an improvement: ‘You will notice how much nearer the blockmaker has got to the original’. The artwork could be found ‘with the other NN wrappers held by your department in the dusty alcove above the plastic curtain in your room’.
Artwork for Life in Lakes & Rivers in four colours with part of printer’s instructions.
The jacket of this book sought to combine wild flowers with their hillside habitat. The author, Ted Lousley, had suggested a scene of ‘rolling downs and a chalk face’ with a selection of wild flowers in the foreground (RT to CE, 23.6.49). Clifford Ellis made several pencil sketches on the margin of the letter conveying that idea to him, perhaps just moments after reading it. By coincidence, and around the same time, Victor Summerhayes, the author of Wild Orchids of Britain, had made a similar suggestion for his own book: an ‘Early Purple Orchid against a background of limestone slopes or downland’. Both ideas found their way on to Lousley’s book, but with a twist.
C&RE discovered a more arresting way of suggesting a ‘chalk face’ by including the Westbury White Horse on the Wiltshire Downs. On the spine they added a second iconic image of the downs: a clump of beech trees crowning a hill. For the wild flowers, they chose a single species, the Early Purple Orchid, probably for the vivid contrast it offered of magenta against bright green (a third colour, the artists’ favourite pale grey, was used mainly for overlaps). This particular orchid is normally a woodland species that does not grow in the open on chalk downs (though it does on the limestone dales of northern England), but perhaps botanical literalism is beside the point. But it was a pity, as Billy Collins pointed out, that they had chosen an orchid, since they could hardly avoid designing another orchid jacket for Summerhayes’ book.
Though it was printed in three colours, this is a bright and cheerful jacket to match an open-air sort of book. Yet the business of transforming artwork into a printed jacket was far from cheerful. The cost of colour printing had risen enormously since the war. One sign of this was the diminution of colour plates in some of the latest New Naturalist titles from 32 or 48 to 16, 8 or even fewer. Collins were anxious to find less expensive methods to produce the jackets, and the obvious way was to print them in-house.
Pencil design for Wild Flowers of Chalk & Limestone on bond-type paper – note the differences on the spine and the note ‘grey’ on the title band.
Wild Flowers of Chalk & Limestone became the subject of experiments designed to make this possible. But the Collins factory in Glasgow was used to printing colours using screens, which would subdue the bright colours of the New Naturalist jackets and weaken their effect. To avoid this, the factory supplied the artists with plastic transparencies and Bristol Board for producing ‘colour separations’ which the printers would combine on the plate with a camera. The artists used both materials but the proof was disappointing, the red losing its intended richness and the dark green coming out as nearly black. The second proof was equally poor with the black (used for the orchids’ pollen-bearing organs) hardly showing at all (RT to CE, 7.7.50).
All of this proved to be extremely time-consuming for a jacket that was needed urgently. The experiments were written off as a failure, and the publishers abandoned colour separations for the time being (with the exception of two titles, The Greenshank and An Angler’s Entomology). In the end, the jacket of Wild Flowers of Chalk & Limestone was produced from scratch by the tried-and-tested method, probably by Baynard Press. The first edition was printed on creamy paper. The 1969 reprint is on whiter paper, which the Collins editor considered an improvement.
Colour sketch for revised design, approximately half the size of the printed jacket.
Like the previous jacket, that of Birds & Men was caught up in Collins’ ill-fated cost-cutting experiments. Hence its production was prolonged. The artists, it seems, made three designs. One was, until recently, thought to be an alternative design for the later title, Man & Birds. This was apparently considered ‘too popular’. Another, which showed a flock of gulls following a tractor, was thought too similar to the jacket of London’s Natural History. However, the basic idea was considered sound, so the artists agreed to redraw it, substituting lapwings for some of the gulls and shifting the tractor to the book’s spine. A close-up lapwing gave the jacket its needed impact. It was a felicitous choice: in the 1930s the book’s author, Max Nicholson, had organised the first nationwide survey of this bird.
This is not a pretty jacket. The furrowed earth was printed in heavy tones of brown, and the farm, with its wind-blasted trees beneath a brooding lavender sky, looks desolate and uncomfortable. To try to cut the mounting costs of book production, Baynard Press had suggested that C&RE should draw directly on to the printing plates. The results, however, were so unsatisfactory that Billy Collins ruled that the work should be redone ‘in the usual way’ (Patricia Cohen to CE, 17.7.50).
The cost-cutting expedients for this jacket and Wild Flowers of Chalk & Limestone had created considerable work for the artists without any improvement in quality. ‘My quarrel with the proof was that chalk work and small detail generally had become much coarser in the proof,’ complained Clifford. ‘It may be the moment to drop a hint that the whole business is on the point of becoming a bore. 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’ (CE to RT, 3.8.50). An apologetic letter from Collins soon arrived with the promise that they did ‘not intend to do any more experimenting with methods of reproduction’(RT to CE,3.8.50).
Alternative design for Birds & Men showing a thrush on a snowy path with a snowman on the spine. Full size, gouache and pencil notes on watercolour paper.
The rather sombre jacket of A Natural History of Man in Britain was the fruit of a fascinating correspondence between Clifford Ellis and the book’s author, the elderly Professor Fleure. The latter had suggested ‘a hillfort rising like an island above wooded slopes’. While that idea held some promise, Fleure went on to propose a man or two as well, perhaps as sentries guarding the fort. Clifford Ellis replied with a patient explanation of the difference between a jacket design and an illustration:
‘I will begin, I hope not too impertinently, by saying something of 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. If you agree to this suggestion, have you a preference for any one fort? Is Maiden Castle too unusual, or too well-known? If you cared to lend us air photographs, we would take great care of them and return them within a few days’ (c ? to Professor Fleure, undated 1948).
Fleure agreed, proposing a couple of earthworks. He also suggested autumn colours to mark All Souls’ Day, one of ‘the two outstanding dates of the prehistoric calendar’. C&RE decided to combine the white horse with an aerial view of a chalk hill and the distant fields beyond beneath a dark late-autumn sky. A chalk track winding up the hill enlivens an otherwise unusually bare spine.
Colour sketch with pencil notes for alternative design on layout paper, approximately half the size of the printed jacket (above).
Fate seemed to treat Wild Orchids and Wild Flowers of Chalk & Limestone the same. They were published and reprinted at about the same time and many of their lavish colour illustrations, among the best in the series so far, were by the same man, Robert Atkinson. And, as chance had defined it, both had a wild orchid on the jacket.
Perhaps in an effort to depart as far as possible from the Chalk & Limestone jacket, C&RE decided to base this jacket on a bee orchid, with its strange, insect-like flowers. A pencil drawing (opposite) survives of a bee orchid spotted by Clifford on the North Walk at Corsham Court. Against the drawing he made detailed notes of the anatomy and exact colours of the flower for working up into a jacket design. All that survives of the bee orchid jacket is a colour sketch based on a close-up of the flower in pink, brown and greeny-yellow against a backcloth of grass blades. The bulging lip of a second bee orchid runs down the spine. It would have made an eye-catching jacket, yet the editors did not take to it, objecting that the public might mistake it for a real bee! It would be better, they said, ‘if the artists chose another orchid which has a sensational shape and beautiful colour, but which bears no resemblance to an animal’ (James Fisher, file note, c. March 1951).
Patiently the Ellises worked on a second design based on the more conventional-looking flowers of the Common Spotted Orchid. The flowers have bold shapes and interesting markings, and their pale colours made a nice contrast with the fresh green used for the grass blades. The least successful aspect of the new design was the spine. Perhaps because they did not want to repeat the separated flowers on the spine of Chalk and Limestone, they attempted to show the whole orchid spike, but the result, especially when the spine has faded, looks like candyfloss and doesn’t really work.
The jacket of the 1968 revised edition was printed on whiter paper which gives a fresher appearance though perhaps lacking some of the subtlety of the original.
Pencil study of Bee Orchid with notes (32 x 20.3 cm).
This, perhaps most people would agree, is a lovely design. The snake seems to come to life as it slithers through the grass blades, the head at the top of the spine, and its body coiling down the spine and over the front to rest in the register above the title band. The adder’s zigzag pattern is a perfect match for the flashes of tawny grass. It is C&RE at their best: simple, bold, satisfying, and saying all that needs to be said.
Yet the author of the book, the veteran herpetologist Malcolm Smith, was not happy with it. ‘The colours are all wrong,’ he complained. ‘There is no pure white on the adder nor have I ever seen one with the colour of No. 2 [yellow-brown]. I suggest that the white be made deep cream and that No. 2 be replaced by No. 3 [deep brick-red]’ (conveyed to CE by RT, 9.12.49). Smith had asked for a frog on the jacket and was perhaps miffed to find an adder instead.
Raleigh Trevelyan passed on these remarks to Clifford, adding his own opinion that ‘it would be a pity to take out the white on the snake, as it lends so much to the design… ‘ Clifford replied on a postcard:
‘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. N.B. This raises the whole problem of inviting authors’ ideas for wrappers. We would much prefer to have a synopsis of the book. If you want to keep down the costs of colour printing and have something that reads well in the bookshop, the designer must have a wide field of subject matter from which to select. We for our part would try to catch the spirit of the book and to be as “accurate” as circumstances permitted. But 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’ (CE to RT, 1.1.50).
Trevelyan wrote to Clifford: ‘I have told the New Naturalist [sic] that any suggestions we get from the authors for designs of the wrappers are to be suggestions only, to be used by you should you find them helpful’ (RT to CE, 11.1.50).
It might have been tricky to design an original jacket for British Mammals when so many of them – seals, squirrels, moles, badgers, red deer, bats – were commissioned subjects for New Naturalist monographs. The process was, in fact, unusually protracted, and was not helped by printing economies pressed on C&RE by the editors. Their first design was of a stag’s head, in red-brown, grey and green, but it was thought to resemble the colours of Birds and Men too closely, and the stag had ‘almost too weird an effect’ (RT to CE, 4.9.50).
The fox and the rabbit of the published jacket now made their entrance, but the original fox was shown much nearer and its head peered round the spine. The rabbit, by contrast, was crouched down and hard to recognise. The jacket was seen as ‘very sombre’ with ‘too much black in the middle of the design’ (RT to CE, 21.2.51). Nor did the editor like their treatment of some leaves which ‘merge too much into the background’ while the rabbit ‘does not look like a rabbit until you look at the design carefully’. Could it be made to sit up more?
For their third design, the Ellises retained the theme of the hunter-fox and the hunted-rabbit but consigned the fox to the background and removed the vegetation. The colours are economical – a cold blue-green and two greys (‘It was a great saving for us that you managed to do the Mammals design in only three colours,’ exclaimed the cost-conscious editor). The rabbit is alert but motionless, hoping it hasn’t been spotted. But it has. A fox’s eyes reflect green in lamp light, and they have a mirror-like retina, the tapetum, which helps it to see in the dark. It is these eerie mirrors within the slim silhouette of the light-footed fox that lend this jacket its sense of chill. Within an austere design, the artists convey a number of key aspects of the book – the hunter and the hunted, shadowy shapes in the dark, and the tense intelligence on display as one animal tries to outwit the other.
Stefan Buczacki, the author, broadcaster and naturalist-gardener – and author of New Naturalist 102, Garden Natural History – writes:
‘The eyes have it. The British Mammals jacket is certainly all about eyes, and it was the possibility that there might be triocular creatures wandering the British countryside that first attracted me to it. The three-eyed rabbit on the spine and its one-eyed companion on the front, where it is spotted by the staring, blank-faced two-eyed fox, are compelling and almost fantastical images. Their hypnotic attraction was enhanced because this was the volume whose spine stared down at me from the natural history shelves of the school library where I spent many a lunch time. Those eyes had me hooked, and for someone whose primary passion had long been for cold-blooded rather than warm-blooded creatures, they all but converted me to the warm and furry. Today, nearly half a century later, I simply cannot think of British mammals of any kind without those riveting three eyes returning to haunt me. In truth, the three-eyed spine doesn’t immediately say ‘mammals’, but then how many other New Naturalist spines really spell out the book’s contents? For me, their cleverness lies in their ability to tempt you to withdraw the volume from the shelf and discover more; both about the rest of the jacket and, of course, the text. But even for artists whose special appeal was largely born of their economy of style and colour, the Ellis jacket to Volume 21 is design stripped practically bare, and is fabulous for that–almost literally so.’
One is struck sometimes by the contrast between C&RE’s sympathetic, even affectionate, depiction of animals, and the harshness of so many of their landscapes: the dark, barren hills of Mountains & Moorlands, the angry sky and weather-blasted farm of Birds & Men, or the gloomy chasm that bisects the jacket of The Peak District. For the jacket of Climate and the British Scene, the weather book of the series, Gordon Manley, had suggested ‘sky and cumulus clouds, giving the suggestion of changeable weather, with typical scenery included’ (conveyed to CE in 8.47). The Ellises obliged, but theirs is not a sky anyone would want to picnic under. Clouds edged with grey dwarf the darkened landscape. One, the shape of a flexed arm, threatens the lonely church as if about to crush it with its cloudy fist. The air is speckled with black and white as though the mother of all thunderstorms is taking shape. The overall sense is of the fragility of human pretensions when faced with the majestic power of nature. But there is one redeeming note: a little bird, puffed up against the cold, snug inside the colophon.
The artwork for Climate and the British Scene used chalk and delicate brushwork on top of three cold colours, blue, moss-green and pale grey (plus black), to achieve its effect. The design, with its hand-lettered title, was completed in 1947, well in advance of the book; if the New Naturalists were arranged in the order in which the jackets were designed, this one would weigh in at about number 12!
Artwork for Climate and the British Scene with pencilled instructions by Clifford Ellis.
Study of a mayfly for the jacket of An Angler’s Entomology. Pencil with notes on bond-type paper.
James Fisher regarded angler-naturalists as ‘one of the pillars of British natural history’. He hoped that the series could include a book written by a fisherman about entomology, or alternatively a book about angling written by an entomologist. By happy chance, an author who was both an angler and an entomologist, J.R. Harris of Trinity College Dublin, contacted Collins to say he was interested in writing such a book, and, moreover, he knew an expert photographer who could produce reasonable colour images of mayflies.
The jacket of An Angler’s Entomology was produced in 1949, three years ahead of publication. C&RE adopted James Fisher’s suggestion of ‘a mayfly and a lure mayfly’ (i.e. an insect and its artificial fishing-fly counterpart). Using only three colours, pale brown, blue-grey and black, their design shows a monstrous mayfly – a mature adult known as a spinner – dancing above the water. The image is almost free from extraneous detail, with cross-hatching to create extra tone in the shadows. The background is simply suggested above the title band. The mayfly’s fishing-fly counterpart is wrapped around the spine and displays the sharpest feature of the design, the black tie-wires and hook, with three artificial tail streamers projecting through the oval.
Julian Huxley and James Fisher liked the design (which they had shown to ‘various fishermen’) but found the image of the mayfly rather insubstantial. But the semi-translucent effect may have been deliberate: mayflies are ephemeral, fairy-like insects, and the artists brought out their combination of grace and insect legginess, the pulpy, spotted abdomen contrasted with the ephemeral shining wings.
This jacket was the only success in a series of otherwise disappointing printing experiments. The blocks were made using C&RE’s colour separations by Odhams of Watford, and the jacket was printed either by Odhams or Collins. Clifford persuaded the publishers to stump up a little extra cash to print the design on good-quality white paper to emphasise the gleam in the mayfly’s wing. This was one of Rosemary’s favourite jackets.
This jacket is one of the few that could be labelled a failure. The fault lay not in the design but in the printing. Its centrepiece is a pink Sea Bindweed flower, which makes a strong and satisfying shape around which the other elements – vegetation, dunes, a distant lighthouse – can be fitted. On the spine sits a second bindweed flower with its petals furled like an umbrella inside a heart-shaped sepal. But the effect depended on printing the three colours, pink, blue and yellow, in the right order, and using exact tones to create extra colours, most notably green. Unfortunately this jacket was among the first to be produced by the new blockmakers at Odhams. Try as they might, they could not prevent the intended green from appearing as a muddy shade of blue, while cliff-top, sea and sky merged into a pink-flecked smog.
‘The colour process for the jacket is unfortunately only partially mechanical’, wrote Clifford, ‘and for the rest it is far from fool-proof. The blocks themselves are good – we give bad marks only for the ineffective filtering of the sky in the block. But the honest-to-goodness ability to mix 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’ (c? to RT, 9.4.52). Odhams replied that they were confident they could do better next time.
Flowers of the Coast marked the last appearance of the charming individual colophons the artists had designed for each title since 1945. ‘We have decided that it would probably be best to have a general New Naturalist colophon instead,’ wrote Raleigh Trevelyan, shortly, and without further explanation.
The author, Professor Steers had given some thought to the jacket of The Sea Coast. He suggested three ideas, or sets of ideas:
A close-up of a lighthouse with a rocky coastline in the background, ‘symbolic of watching our coasts’
A tuft of marram grass or some other vegetation with sand dune or salt marsh in the background.
Some coastal phenomenon, such as an arched stack or strangely shaped rock in the foreground, ‘likely to arouse the curiosity of the general public’.
What he decidedly did not want was any birds or animals (conveyed to ce by RT, 4.9.50).
C&RE took up the general thrust of these ideas, although their eventual design was closer to the author of Flowers of the Coast, Ian Hepburn’s suggestion of ‘some windswept trees and bushes, bent over by the prevailing winds, on the skyline’ (conveyed to CE by RT, 11.10.49).
For the first version of the jacket, C&RE incorporated a lighthouse, which ran down the spine. Either they or the editors were not happy about this, and the design was re-jigged, moving the lighthouse to a distant promontory and paring down the detail to a rather bleak scene of bent bushes and cliffs circling a bay. The spine was now a bare beach brushed by the blotchy branches of the windblown bush. The design required just two tones of brown plus turquoise, relying on overlaps for the rest. Though a vision of nature at its starkest, it said ‘sea coast’ boldly and clearly enough, and the sea is often that blue-green shade. Closer inspection reveals tiny, characteristic touches: the little tree on the distant foreland, the bands of surf washing towards the viewer.
The artwork for The Sea Coast uses a red tint to indicate areas of overlapping colour creating a weird surreal effect.
The Weald is a dry book. The author was an academic geographer who stuck firmly to his brief, and the reader expecting to read about the woods, trees, flowers and birds in the rural heart of southeast England was in for a disappointment. Raleigh Trevelyan was hoping for a compensating bright, cheery jacket. If so, he was disappointed again. For The Weald C&RE produced a landscape in which hedgerows and fields echo one another into the distance in a curiously flat vertical plane that defies perspective. There are no bright colours and no foreground. If you look closely, somewhere within the maze of fields a herd of sweetly rendered Friesian cows is quietly grazing.
The surviving artwork of The Weald seems to be an earlier, brighter version of the design. Trevelyan did not like it, lamenting the lack of ‘fresh air, light and springlike’ colours (RT to CE, 7.5.52). Perhaps, he suggested, the cows should be brought forward. C&RE made some alterations to the jacket, but once again the printer failed to do justice to their conception. Even so, as Trevelyan later admitted, the jacket ‘certainly grows on one, and I am now very fond of it, after all the hard things I said in the past’ (RT to CE, 13.3.53).
Once again C&RE’s artwork uses red to indicate areas of overlapping colour creating this almost abstract image of The Weald. The green and blue tones were much fresher and brighter than the printed jacket. Watercolour, gouache and wax on watercolour paper with printing instructions in pencil.
Dartmoor can be a gloomy place, and the jacket of Dartmoor is certainly austere and uncompromising. The foreground, with the iconic stone clapper bridge and rush of water over dark boulders, is lively enough, but above it rises a dark, threatening hill on which unfriendly spruce trees are daubed. The river winds up the spine towards the deep-green title band, but this is not a Dartmoor to attract the tourists.
That was precisely the objection to it. By 1953 the publishers were pinning a great deal on the New Naturalist jackets to encourage sales (while trying at the same time to print them as cheaply as possible). Dartmoor had seemed a promising title but the text turned out disappointingly dour and effortful; ‘We had to get the author to rewrite a lot of the text to degloomify it,’ remarked Raleigh Trevelyan. And now, as if the gloom were catching, the book was to have a dark, dour jacket. It looks all right in close-up, admitted Trevelyan, ‘but the poster effect is lost at a distance’ (RT to CE, 15.10.52).
‘What would sell Dartmoor? replied Clifford (who had made a special journey). ‘Most visitors come by car and view it from car or motor coach. We did consider using a close-up of a windswept mane-blowing Dartmoor pony stallion’s head’ (CE to RT, 16.10.52) but felt it was ‘untrue’ to the book. He also moved the clapper bridge closer to match what Trevelyan called the ‘hit-you-in-the-eye trade requirements’.
Odhams the blockmakers did little to brighten the clouds. The line draughtsman had been ‘a bit clumsy’ and, as Clifford complained, ‘nobody on the printers’ staff really able to see with an artist’s eye’ (CE to RT 16.10.52).
The jacket of Sea-Birds is dominated by a puffin. It was a doubly appropriate choice. In the previous year, one of the authors, Ronald Lockley, had written a book about puffins. And, apart from being delightful, puffins help to sell books. Allen Lane’s Puffin picture books for children were at the height of their success at the time Sea-Birds was published.
For C&RE the main attraction of the puffin was probably its colourful bill and red eye, contrasting with its black-and-white body. It enabled them to revive their old trick of confining the brightest colour to the key element and focus of the design. The puffin’s head and shoulders fill the panel beneath the title band. Three fellow auks (a guillemot and two razorbills) are flying in on the diagonal, while the underside of the wing of a third razorbill makes a fit subject for the spine.
The ‘rough’ of Sea-Birds was much admired, but James Fisher spotted something wrong. ‘Entirely through my wrong briefing’, he wrote, ‘you have been asked to do a puffin holding fish in its beak with both heads and tails sticking out … The truth is puffins nearly always hold small fish in their beaks with only their bodies and tails sticking out … Thus the [fish’s] head is normally invisible’ (JF to CE, 31.5.50). The artists changed the design accordingly, but rejected Fisher’s further suggestion of placing another puffin on the spine ‘looking straight at you’. The National Book League chose Sea-Birds (and Squirrels) for its 100 Best Jackets for 1955.
Tim Bernhard, the wildlife illustrator and graphic designer, writes: ‘When I first saw this jacket I was struck most by the apparent simplicity of the design, the bright cadmium-red of the title band and the main subject of a puffin’s head. I love this quirky puffin with his slightly surprised expression, and bill stuffed with freshly caught sand eels. The background is a cool grey over which a flat indigo-blue is printed to represent the sea. The same tone is used for the textures of the fish and the puffin’s face. The group of diving guillemots and razorbills introduces movement and life. And the design is completed with the bold use of black for the puffin’s body and the head, tails and feet of the flying birds.’
Full-size design for the Sea-Birds jacket using pencil and gouache on layout paper. Note the fish heads in the puffin’s beak, later changed to tails at the author’s suggestion.
The World of the Honeybee was the first and, so far, only book in the mainstream series to be devoted to a single species. It was published in what Raleigh Trevelyan called a ‘bastard size’, smaller than other volumes in the main series but larger than the standard monograph size.
The book is full of monochrome images of bees and their honeycombs, swarming, feeding and raising their brood. A rival book on bees had recently been published, and Billy Collins wanted a contrasting style of jacket image, dominated by a very large bee. C&RE obliged, producing at very short notice a design showing a newly hatched adult bee emerging from its cell. The combination of the bee and the honeycomb, underlined by the rich orange honey-colour, linked the bee with the hive without calling for much colour or detail. This is a subtle design relying on overlaps for tone and texture, and the mesmeric quality of the repeated pattern. Its quality was partly lost on the reprints on which the orange ink threatens to overwhelm the design. Not knowing the width of the book, the black oval was drawn too wide.
Is this design a bit too simplified, and the Ellis bee lacking in sweetness? The message, perhaps, is that the hive is not a cozy place. However much we nurture them and enjoy the products of their labour, the world of the honeybee is nothing like our own.
The artwork with printing instructions.
Top Sketch design for Moths at approximately half size, gouache and watercolour on typing paper with listed colours in pencil.
The printed jacket.
Although it shared the same author, the jacket of Moths is nothing like Butterflies. Instead of a landscape with caterpillars, four fat-bodied moths are flying with unrealistic outstretched wings towards a narrow strip of brilliant light, perhaps a door left half open. It is night; the colours are dark and subdued. The attention is focused on the rich textures and patterns of the moths’ wings: spots, zigzags, crescents and bands. They are an indication of the variety of moths that occur in almost any garden, hiding in the shadows as they await the dark.
The jacket artwork, printed opposite, has brighter, bluer colours than the printed jacket. There are also surviving sketches showing how the artists worked up a design from pencil and colour ‘roughs’. The jacket is printed in three colours, purple-blue, blue-green and black. The title is outlined in huge mechanical capital letters on the black title band, made even blacker by overlaying with blue. The design was robust enough to sustain a succession of reprints without loss of detail.
The Moths jacket seemed to please everyone. ‘Opening a parcel from Corsham,’ exclaimed Raleigh Trevelyan, ‘is almost as exciting as opening a Christmas present … wonderfully original and striking designs’.
Mark Parsons, a moth specialist working for the charity Butterfly Conservation, comments:
‘The moths on this jacket are a mixture of fact and fantasy. The largest appears to be a Privet Hawk-moth, with its elegantly shaped forewings, while the one folding over the spine resembles an Oak Beauty. The spotted moth is a creature of the artists’ imagination, though it is perhaps based on the pattern of a female Wood Leopard moth. The moths are presented in a rather impressionistic fashion and as they would appear in a collection, with their wings spread apart at right angles to their bodies. It is artistically pleasing, but rather dark and dingy, and of its time when there was more emphasis on collecting than there is today.’
Artwork for Moths with printing instructions in pencil; includes gum marks where the work was fastened to the plate to be photographed.
Man & the Land was a kind of sequel to Dudley Stamp’s Britain’s Structure and Scenery, describing the impact of ‘man’ as he settled and transformed the landscape. As usual, C&RE were sent ‘pulls’ from the book, including some of the plates, and left to wonder how to represent ‘man’ this time. William Collins put in his bit by suggesting a row of Lombardy poplars and ‘better cows than sheep’.
Cows and poplars are fine in their way, but neither expresses the way we stamp ourselves on the landscape in ways that are clearly not all for the better. c&re found a more unambiguous statement in the juxtaposition of a felled and a planted tree, the latter being on the spine inside its tree-guard. By a line of trees in the receding distance, black-and-grey cows graze obliviously in the middle distance.
Once again c&re had come up with a neat and original summation of the book and expressed it with economy of colour (two greens and a grey). Yet the Board was less enthusiastic about Man & the Land than some recent jackets, feeling it looked a bit too much like The Weald and that the tree-stump image lacked the necessary impact. It did not help that, on the proof at any rate, Odhams had printed the colours in the wrong order and so the green ‘lacks body’.
Original design of Trees, Woods and Man in gouache and black chalk on watercolour paper with printing instructions in pencil. The oval symbol and book number have been ‘collaged’ on.
Trees, Woods and Man was a favourite jacket both of the editors and the artists. It draws the eye into the dark ranks of trees, and the colours, black, brown and fresh green (printed in that sequence), harmonise beautifully.
The book came out at a time when traditional woodland management, such as coppicing, was becoming replaced by ‘high forest’ and plantations. In C&RE’s vision, the trees are regimented in rows; they all look the same and the inference of the numbers painted on their trunks is that they are about to be cut down: trees in the service of man the planter and consumer.
As it happens, the numbers indicate otherwise. The author, Herbert Edlin, pointed out that the artists had in fact drawn a Forestry Commission ‘sample plot’ in which the trees are measured every few years to monitor their growth. Far from being ‘doomed’, they are ‘saved’.
George Peterken, author of NN 105, The Wye Valley, and a distinguished woodland ecologist, comments: ‘I chose Trees, Woods and Man when, for the only time, I was awarded a school prize, and I subsequently spent most of my working life working with the multifarious interactions between people, trees and woods. Quite why the Ellises’ chose the interior of a maturing conifer plantation – the most industrial form of woodland management – is not explained. Perhaps they were attracted to the overwhelming regularity of the design and the opportunity to deploy a strikingly simple colour scheme of greens, relieved by black and white. The interlacing, rigidly geometric branches contrast with the parallel lines of the trunks and shadows, all free of interruption from untidy ground vegetation. The trees stand in lines, evenly spaced, all of the same size, and neatly numbered, so we are instantly aware of the depth of the perspective and the control exerted by the forester. The message is unmistakable: trees, aggregations of trees, and people are bound together. As an image it is arresting, and I was pleased, but not surprised, to see the original on display at a South Bank exhibition of landscape painting, ‘Landscape in Britain 1850–1950’ at the Hayward Gallery, London.’
I will never forget what Max Walters said about this jacket. We were talking about New Naturalists at his house in Grantchester by a window overlooking his wild flower garden. At some point he picked up Mountain Flowers, glowered at it for a moment, and said something like, ‘What’s this supposed to be, do you know?’ He had asked the same question when he first saw the book. ‘I would have preferred a recognisable plant on the cover,’ he had grumbled, back in 1956.
No one knew the British flora better than Max, and he knew perfectly well that the delicate flower on the jacket of Mountain Flowers is the Twinflower, Linnaea borealis, necessarily in simplified form for a lithographic composition in three colours. Not choosing to recognise it was his way of saying he did not like the jacket. Neither, it seems, did the sales department at Collins. They thought the colours too cold and too similar to certain other New Naturalist jackets, notably British Plant Life. They felt the book needed ‘a simpler design with more punch’. C&RE produced an alternative design but it was decided, on reflection, to proceed with the first one.
C&RE had seen enough of the text to know that the book was about the mountain setting almost as much as the flowers themselves: the climate, geography and the grand scenery of summits, corries and alpine lakes. The jacket captures the mood of an alpine scene on a rare cloudless day in the spring, the snowcapped hills reflected in the chilly, deep-blue water. The Twinflower, rooted off the page, was probably chosen for its delicate simplicity and the shape of its pendant, bell-like flowers.
It is impossible for me to judge this jacket objectively for it encloses a book I fell in love with. My first permanent job in nature conservation was in the Nature Conservancy Council in northeast Scotland, where I found myself the proud custodian of most of chapter six. There I found the Twinflower often, but never by the shores of a mountain lake. So what? Jackets are about selling books, not ecology.
Hearing that Collins was considering reprinting this venerable title in 1983, Clifford Ellis wrote to the new editor of the series, Crispin Fisher:
‘The World of Plankton jackets have had a sad history. When this admirable book was first published in ‘56, the planktonic jacket we designed for it was scorned by the Sales Department as being too unfamiliar. So instead we provided a seascape. Quite recently a new jacket was needed so, assuming that in twenty-odd years the sales people might have become better educated, we did a new planktonic design. This seems to have pleased the author, nor did we hear of objections from the Sales Department. During the latter part of this twenty-odd years, however, there were not only changes in visual vocabulary but also in the costs of colour printing – and a beautiful jacket, ready for printing (not to speak of text and illustrations) were put aside. Hence our interest in what seemed to be a sign of life.’
The jacket was proofed but never printed, and the last and best of The World of Plankton jackets now hangs on the wall of the Collins reference books department above a cabinet with a complete run of New Naturalists.
The Open Sea was commissioned, as a single title, back in 1944. Alister Hardy belatedly produced an enormous tome which, by fortunate chance, could be divided into two books of roughly equal length, one on fish, the other on the small life on which all forms of marine life, from jellyfish to whales, ultimately depend – the plankton.
James Fisher thought it ‘great fun that only plankton will do’ for the jacket. The artwork for C&RE’s first design survives, showing a planktonic ‘medusa’ in opaque gouache paint (the transparent inks used by the printer would have created a better impression of seawater). It caused some head scratching at Collins. ‘Did you invent these animals,’ Raleigh Trevelyan asked Clifford, ‘or are they ones that exist?’ (RT to CE, 31.8.54). They were, Clifford replied, ‘faithfully rendered’ from photographs and from direct observation at the aquarium during a recent visit to Naples.
Colour sketch for a new jacket designed in the late 1970s. Copies were printed but unfortunately this fine jacket was never used.
Artwork for the ‘plankton’ jacket in gouache and chalk on watercolour with printing instructions added. This design was turned down on the grounds that the organisms were too unfamiliar.
At the publishers’ request, C&SE substituted a seascape. This is the artwork for the published jacket (opposite) with printer’s instructions added in pencil.
But it would not do. Trevelyan worried that the design did not convey any ‘sense of mystery and movement in the open sea … There’s something slightly static about [it], and it doesn’t suggest vast oceans’. Most crucially, the ‘the sales people’ believed that the design would not appeal to book buyers since they would not understand what these strange creatures were. He suggested, instead, ‘a design showing the sea, pure and simple, just waves’ (RT to CE, 13.9.55).
So the artists prepared a second, wholly different jacket design expressing the ‘mystery of the open sea’. In blue, green and black, it is a seascape seemingly lit by moonlight with a pathway of rippling reflections illuminating the green plankton floating near the surface. It is one of the more abstract designs of the series and one you could interpret in different ways. I used to see the top half as waves splashing against dark rocks rather than as a cloudy sky.
This jacket served throughout the lifetime of the book. The third, never published, jacket was another, more successful, attempt to show planktonic organisms. Alister Hardy was ‘delighted with it … Whilst I liked the original jacket, I think this is so much more descriptive of the contents, as well as being most attractive. Clifford Ellis has caught the spirit of living plankton so well – I feel he must have drawn it from life.’ Indeed, he probably had.
The world of the soil is dark and wormy; animals living down there have poor eyesight but an acute sense of smell and an ability to tunnel and dig. Most of the beasties that appear in Sir John Russell’s book are rather unprepossessing: grubs, millipedes, bacteria and worms of all kinds. As an agriculturalist he was chiefly interested in the soil’s fertility and in the interactions of chemistry, weather and life that maintain it. But this is stuff for a diagram, not a jacket.
How do you sell soil? C&RE must have thought hard about it before enlisting the help of the soil’s most charismatic inhabitant, the mole. But they were less interested in showing the whole mole, so to speak, than what the mole does. They concentrated on the animal’s tunneling instrument: one of its spade-like fore-paws. Behind it is the dark mass of the animal’s body in grey, its pig-like snout extending on to the spine (in later, darker printings of the jacket the mole’s head is less easy to make out). The jacket design is rendered in strong, dark colours, brown, dark grey and black.
Trevelyan was ‘very pleased indeed with your most striking jacket’ (RT to C?, 4.12.56). The design is subtle and the mole obscure, yet the earthy tones, and squirls and speckles of colour, are intriguing and strangely satisfying.
Searching for an image that conjures up the migrations of insects, c&re considered including Clouded Yellow and Painted Lady butterflies before choosing the simple, bold, white-and-black outline of the Large White or cabbage white butterfly. The artists did some homework on the subject, discovering that migrating butterflies fly ‘dead straight – even through railway tunnels!’ We are in the midst of a mass migration, perhaps twenty feet above the ground and looking upwards into the butterfly ‘snow storm’.
The design called for only three colours: pure blue, buff-yellow and black, letting in white as needed and printing yellow over blue for the shadows. The artists’ use of black is sparing, and the overall effect is one of lightness and motion, a cloud of white wings on their way to England’s cabbages.
The artwork, which was ready for printing by April 1957, was liked. That of the 1971 reprint of the book has a paler title band and oval, and a slightly deeper blue giving a sharper, more contrasted appearance.
The second half of The Open Sea was published two years after the first in 1959 (the author had in the meantime been knighted for services to marine biology). In some ways Fish and Fisheries was a more straightforward jacket to design: compared with alien and commercially unacceptable plankton, one could envisage a commercially acceptable image of fish and fishing nets. While The Open Sea was still one book, its author, no mean artist himself, had suggested ‘jellyfish or shoal fish’ with ‘fishing boats above’. The artists’ first design was a ‘wonderfully selling’ one featuring some killer whales, but was rejected on the understandable grounds that the text fails to mention them! (RT to CE,23.8.55)
C&RE thereupon came up with a design that matched Hardy’s suggestion, but with their own take on life at sea. Back in the 1950s, many smaller fishing vessels were rough, rugged craft with masts, smokestacks and, often, sails. It was a hard life on cold rough seas, searching for the herring not by echo-sounders but by the movements of sea-birds and the tell-tale traces of fish-oil in the water. The artists’ design showed their life as it often was: alone on vast waters on a windy, dark, overcast day, the breakers rolling, the sail rigged and the smoke streaming from the funnel. This is an inshore mackerel boat, hazy in outline, with a shoal of fish swimming just below the surface. The colours are sombre and in low tone: all greys and blue-greens, and both fish and fishers are shown in distant view to emphasise the immensity of the sea (reprints are printed on white instead of cream paper, and so appear slightly brighter). The boat’s sail makes a neat emblem for the spine.
The jacket may lack some of its intended impact. At proof stage someone noted that ‘something has gone wrong with the fish and the black doesn’t look quite right on top of the blue sea.’ (RT to CE, 5.12.57).
As if to prove that spiders, viewed sympathetically, are rather beautiful and amazingly diverse, the author Bill Bristowe privately commissioned the best entomological draughtsman of the day, Arthur Smith, to produce 230 drawings in line and wash for The World of Spiders. They help to make the book one of ‘the best New Naturalists we have ever had’, according to James Fisher.
From the outset, C&RE had decided that a web rather than an actual spider ‘would be the right motif for the jacket – less difficult in colour and less fussy’ (CE to RT, 9.9.57). Their orb-web does in fact show a garden spider, small and properly facing head-down at the centre of the web. It is outlined by a spot of rich reddish-brown matching the title band and oval. Against a richly textured background, the tight spirals of the web are caught in the light, and glisten with pure white accentuated by Ellis’s favourite soft grey. The colours of the artwork are even richer than the printed jacket, and still show the faint pencil lines of the underdrawing.
Unfortunately this jacket is light-sensitive. It is rare indeed, nowadays, to find Spiders with its original rich red-brown colour on the spine.
Artwork for The World of Spiders jacket with the usual pencilled instructions for the printer.
Charcoal and watercolour sketches for The Folklore of Birds and the printed jacket.
The Folklore of Birds was a title that William Collins tried hard not to publish. Commissioned in the heady days of the 1940s, when New Naturalists were selling well, the prospects for a scholarly book about an esoteric subject seemed less rosy ten years later. When the author held Collins to the agreement they had signed, the latter was minded first to cut colour printing to a single frontispiece, and then to deny the book an Ellis jacket, with the excuse that, as an ‘art’ subject, a jacket along the lines of The Art of Botanical Illustration would be more suitable.
In the end more generous councils prevailed, and for this Cinderella of a book C&RE produced one of their most striking designs, a barn owl swooping through the dark straight towards the reader. On the spine hangs a crescent moon close to the tail feathers of the owl. It is a mystical image, spooky but not frightening, appropriate to a book that is as much about superstition and psychology as about wild birds. The artists teased out a rich tone of dark blue for the night sky and the owl’s deep eyes by printing opaque grey over black. Flashes of bright ochre outline the plumage, and the owl’s mask is richly textured in grey on white. Since there is little pure black on the jacket, the artists could print the title band and oval in that colour without compromising the design. The composition is beautifully thought out and everyone, including the author and Billy Collins, loved it.
Of all the New Naturalist titles published up to 1985, this one had the shortest time in print. Book-lovers had less than four years to appreciate the Ellis owl.
Preliminary sketches for The Folklore of Birds, along with those of The Rabbit, were on display at the Crafts Council exhibition, ‘The Decorative Beast’, in 1990.
Artwork for The Folklore of Birds with number collaged on and printing instructions.
Like The World of the Honeybee, Bumblebees was originally listed as a ‘special volume’, but was eventually published in the ‘bastard’ format, size, larger than a monograph but slightly smaller than the rest of the main series.
The jacket shares the full-on bee-face of Honeybee but in other respects it is as different as the artists could make it. The Bumblebees jacket is richly coloured and full of vitality. C&RE’s long-tongued bee is seeking nectar and pollen from a foxglove, and we see it head-on, as if from within the flower. This bee is probably modelled on the Common Carder-bee Bombus pascuorum, which is indeed fond of foxglove, though the latter was probably chosen for its lively internal pattern of spots and rich pinky-purple colour rather than strict biological conformity. The spots, together with the edge of the bee’s middle leg, carry over onto the spine. Without careful inspection one would never guess that this colourful jacket uses only three inks (black, pink and yellow, printed in that order).
Billy Collins thought that Bumblebees and Dragonflies were ‘two of the most lovely you have yet done’. If there is a problem, it is that most of the bumblebee’s plump, banded body is hidden by the title band. This is an unfamiliar view of a bee and may not, as a result, shout ‘Bumblebee!’ loudly enough. It would make an equally good jacket for a book about pollination, and, nearly forty years later, and by coincidence (for he had not seen the rare Bumblebees wrapper), Robert Gillmor did indeed choose foxgloves and bumblebees in his design for NN 83: The Natural History of Pollination.
A variant design for Bumblebees in full colour with pencil notes.
Three years before Dragonflies was published, Clifford Ellis was sent a complete set of Sam Beaufoy’s colour transparencies ‘for inspirational purposes’. To help inspire them further, one of the authors, Philip Corbet, suggested the artists base their design on the Emperor dragonfly and its distinctive larva. The latter could squat on the spine, he suggested, while one or more newly emerged adults could inhabit the front of the book. There is more in the book about the Emperor dragonfly than any other species; Corbet had based his doctorate thesis on it.
Though the Emperor and its larva did make their way onto the jacket, they were barely recognisable. The artists were more interested in the way light plays on the wings of a dragonfly hawking along the edge of a lake than in precise details of its anatomy. Hence this dragonfly is seen in distant view, inside a lozenge of blue at the centre of the design framed by vertical banks and overhanging trees. The brilliance of the sunlight is increased by the dark tones (green overprinted by blue) in which it is enclosed.
This jacket, thought the editors, was ‘one of the best the Ellises had produced’. William Collins wrote to congratulate them: ‘I think it is amazing how you can 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.’
This is one of c&re’s more impressionistic jackets: the dragonfly hangs there for a moment, more reflected light than form or colour, and then is gone. We are left alone with the lake shimmering in the August sun and the dark trees rustling in the breeze.
Artwork for the rejected design of the Fossils jacket, gouache and chalk on watercolour paper with printing instructions in pencil.
The printed jacket.
The original design for Fossils was a strange thing, a dark jacket showing the skull of a marine reptile, perhaps an ichthyosaur, preserved in the rock. C&RE might have sketched it from life (so to speak) from one of the dark-grey fossils from the ‘Blue Lias’ rocks of Lyme Regis. Its focus was the fossil’s baleful eye socket, while its teeth would project around on to the spine on which the circle containing the series number stood out in white, like a full moon.
The Board did not like it, and this extraordinary design was rejected. The editors suggested an alternative in the form of an ammonite, whose tight spiral and segmented shell might make a satisfying pattern. The Ellises took up the idea and ran with it, creating a richly textured jacket printed in three colours, black, grey and orange. Two more fossils with radiating patterns, probably sea urchins, appear on the spine. The artists made more use of pure black than usual, and deployed it to lend form and depth to the ammonite. The colours are nicely balanced and give an air of immeasurable antiquity. With their usual attention to detail, C &R E had the title printed in huge capital letters to match the weight of the design.
Artwork for the accepted jacket with printing instructions. The full design on the spine was truncated on the printed jacket.
The bright and colourful jacket of Weeds & Aliens is a welcome ray of sunshine among the more sombre tones of its immediate neighbours on the shelf, and it has always been a favourite. The design is simple but strong: poppies, printed in the brightest of pure reds, peep through harvest-ready yellow cornstalks. Overlaps are minimal, though yellow on black provides some subtle variation in the stippled shade. The poppies are matched by a pure red title band. This sunny design was done in January. When the artwork reached the publishers, in April 1960, it ‘was universally admired’.
The printed jacket.
Sketch for the published jacket, full size, gouache and pencil on typing paper with instructions in pencil.
Late poppies among the corn were an obvious choice for a book about ‘weeds’. Yet the book’s scientific editor, John Gilmour, had suggested, rather, a ‘field with [blue] cornflowers’ or else a design based on the flaring-trumpet shape and contrasting prickly fruit of a thornapple plant (this had received some recent notice in the press following a modest outbreak of poisonous thornapples in the Home Counties). A colour sketch of the ‘thornapple alternative’ survives: a dark jacket in cold violets and dark greens, contrasting with the flower’s white petals. It might have made an interesting design, but with nothing like the emotive pulling power of bright poppies among the corn.
Weeds & Aliens needed a pretty jacket. Apart from a colour frontispiece the book is illustrated entirely in monochrome.
Sketch for alternative design of Weeds & Aliens, full size, in gouache paint on watercolour paper.
Colour sketches for The Peak District jacket on cartridge paper, watercolour mixed with white and black (8.5 x 7.5 and 9x8 cm).
Perhaps the Ellises were happier designing jackets for titles about wild animals and plants than landscapes. Those they created for The Weald and Dartmoor were surprisingly bleak and rather forbidding, yet it was precisely these jackets that had most impressed the main author of The Peak District, Kenneth Edwards. He asked for something on similar lines, with the suggestion of a scene of ‘moors and valleys’, which certainly left plenty of room for interpretation.
For The Peak District, C&RE designed a claustrophobic landscape entirely in vertical planes, a narrow defile through the rocks, as if shattered by an earthquake, with a distant solitary tree beyond. Perhaps it was inspired by the sheer rocks of Water-cum-Jolly Dale shown in monochrome on Plate II of the book. All the rest is blocks and smudges in tones of green, the darkest of which is close to black. At one moment the jacket gives the impression of rocks with vegetation on the ledges and slopes below; at the next it seems to dissolve into an abstract composition, like one of Clifford’s ‘Untitled Lithographs’ from the 1950s.
What the Board made of it is unrecorded. The minutes record only that it was ‘approved with suggestions for improving the cleft in the rock’. The rate of production of New Naturalist titles had slowed down considerably by the time The Peak District was published, and this was the first new C&RE commission in more than a year.
This title was very much the creation of the Editorial Board, and was championed by its two most distinguished members, Sir Julian Huxley and Dudley Stamp (shortly to be knighted himself) over the reluctance of William Collins who, an editor recalled later, ‘took against it for some reason’. Both Stamp and his fellow geographer, W.G. Hoskins, had been members of the recent Royal Commission on Common Land (which included village greens and urban commons), and Stamp was eager to bring its findings before a larger public. It was, in a sense, a one-off title, and there was some discussion about whether it should have a different, non-Ellis jacket; at one point Huxley suggested an old print of ‘cricket or prize-fighting etc. on greens’.
Fortunately they changed their minds. This was the first new jacket c&re had designed since The Peak District, more than a year ago, yet its colour tones, in greens and greys, are remarkably similar. The Common Lands jacket, however, is much softer, looser and easier on the eye. A donkey, with its bow legs and big ears, is grazing rough vegetation in the foreground while behind it a cricket match is in progress. The pure white of the cricketers (the batsman on the spine is leaning forward into his stroke), the umpire and the sightscreen form a vivid contrast with the tones of green. The donkey and the cricket match neatly capture the combination of use and pleasure which characterise our commons and greens; they also contrast athletic bowling and batting with quiet, placid chomping. It was as well the artists did not choose Morris-dancing as a theme; for the revised edition, Stamp had a plate (IIIb) replaced after a reviewer complained of ‘too many Morris men’.
By some mischance, later printings of this jacket are taller by about a quarter of an inch than the binding.
One of the big selling points of the New Naturalist library, when it was conceived back in 1943, had been ‘the latest methods of colour photography and reproduction’. Twenty years later, with falling sales, Collins felt that a nice colour photograph in tune with the changing times might be a better commercial draw than an artwork jacket. Perhaps, too, it was felt that landscapes had not been among the most successful of the Ellis designs. At any rate, for this long delayed ‘regional’ volume, the fateful decision was made to try out a new style of jacket. The Ellises were not brought into the decision. Shortly after publication, they received a letter from the Collins editor: ‘You may have seen The Broads in the shops. It was decided to have photographic jackets for these volumes that have tourist appeal in a given region as opposed to the volumes for the serious naturalist’ (Patsy Cohen to CE, 1.6.65).
Yet The Broads, as Ted Ellis and his helpers had written it, was not really a ‘regional’ guide book at all; apart from a chapter on ‘Man in Broadland’ and a brief discussion on river craft, it was pure natural history.
The irony was that The Broads had already received an Ellis design, not once but twice (and a third would follow before all was done). At a point when the book had seemed nearly ready, around 1955, C&RE had designed a jacket featuring the head of a great crested grebe with sailing boats in the background. The Board was unhappy with it since the grebe gave the impression this was a bird book (the bird content is, in fact, well throttled-back). Moreover, it resembled another colourful bird with a long beak, the woodpecker on the not-yet-published Woodland Birds. Nonetheless, James Fisher was eager to use it for a possible monograph on the great crested grebe.
In the meantime, the Board asked for a different kind of jacket with ‘more light, clouds, with reeds and perhaps a sail in the distance. The central figure could be a windmill’. Billy Collins added a request ‘to avoid getting the central figure overlapping onto the spine’ (RT to CE, 13.4.55). When the text at last seemed nearly ready, in 1961, the Ellises were asked to produce such a design evoking the ‘general feeling of the place’ (Jean Whitcombe to C?, 28.7.61). Their design, which was probably never proofed, had a black band with sailing boats and windmills.
The jacket of this much-delayed book was eventually given a photographic jacket in the mistaken belief that it would have more popular appeal.
What The Broads eventually received instead of grebes or windmills was a vapid photograph of a sailing boat, a Norfolk wherry reproduced from a glass slide taken by John Markham (and the reproduction was poor, as one can see by comparing the jacket with the book’s frontispiece of the same scene). The title was let in on a partial band near the bottom, but as a sop to disappointed collectors the spine retained the usual band, numeral and oval. Today the jacket looks dreary and forgettable, the laminated paper cracking with age. Some thought so even at the time.
By 1974, when a reprint was being considered, William Collins conceded that the new jacket had been a mistake; not only was it an aesthetic blemish but it had not, after all, succeeded in raising sales. The second Ellis design was dusted down and prepared by the new method of colour separations. It is an original and arresting image of a windmill reflected in water, using a lot of the artists’ favourite turquoise. But it was never used. Ted Ellis never got around to revising the book, and so the bold new jacket by his namesake artists was not needed.
The Snowdonia National Park was the first repeat title in the series (unless one counts The Highlands and Islands). Unlike the unwieldy and long out-of-print Snowdonia, Bill Condry’s book was all of-a-piece and full of the sharp observation of a first-rate field naturalist. What it lacked, in the mid-1960s New Naturalist slump, was colour.
It also lacked an Ellis jacket. By coincidence, ‘Snowdonia 2’ came on the heels of another regional book, The Broads, and hence it fell foul of the new, and, as it turned out, strictly temporary, policy to dress regional books in photographic jackets. This time the jacket design incorporated a colour picture by Kenneth Scowen of a bog and some wooded hills, with the distinctive conical peak of Cader Idris in the background. The jacket looked even less like a New Naturalist than The Broads. The editors, who claimed to ‘like the idea of a photographic wrapper’, might have had second thoughts when they saw it. At any rate, the experiment was not repeated, and the next title was back with an Ellis jacket.
Like The Broads, The Snowdonia National Park suffered the indignity of a photographic jacket.
Grass and Grasslands (the original title was to have been Grass, then Grass and Man) was conceived as a book about natural grasslands and wild species of grass. After the commissioned author, Cyril Hubbard, dropped out, an agriculturalist, Ian Moore, took on the title, and in his hands the book became more of a treatise on the use of grass for sown fields and lawns. In their preface the editors noted that ‘the interrelationship between man and nature’ had come to be an important theme of the series, though in this case nature seemed to be almost invisible.
Given that Moore’s book is chiefly about replacing wild places with crops of grass, it is tempting to see c&re’s all-green jacket as a satire (though it was almost certainly not so intended). It is a view of a meadow as seen from a high vantage point through which a stream slowly winds. Along the banks are some ‘lollipop’ willows by which black-and-white dairy cows are safely grazing. But these are small details on a field that resembles a green baize card table.
The overwhelming ‘green-ness’ of the design was not intentional. The artists always specified the order in which the colours should be printed, but, it seems, in this case the printers (who had not handled a New Naturalist jacket for some years) made a mess of it. ‘The spiky shadows below the trees bear no resemblance to the block pulls’, notes an internal memo, and the printer had muddied the dark tones by printing them in the wrong order. In particular, the crucial black tone had been ‘killed’ by overprinting it with dark green. If properly followed, the design would have had far more punch. Even so, there is still something charming about the ‘toy’ cows and the reflections of the neat little trees in the cool stream.
Clifford Ellis often turned to the New Naturalist books for practical advice. He used this one to convince the college governors as to how the playing fields should be looked after.
Back in 1969, the public perception of nature reserves was as places set aside for wildlife. In the mind’s eye, at least, they were surrounded by fences with a prominent sign reminding walkers to keep out. This gave c&re the idea of a big traffic sign, a bright-red, circular ‘No Entry’ sign which, happily, made a marvellous contrast with dull green.
Nature Conservation was the editors’ own contribution to the series. The main text had been written with his customary speed and efficiency by the now knighted Sir Dudley Stamp, but, after his untimely death in Mexico in August 1966, the typescript was left to his fellow editors, James Fisher and Kenneth Mellanby, to finish off. This took a long time, and it was not until 1969 that the book was ready for publication (though ‘positively dripping with mistakes’, according to an internal memo). The editors were by now in full agreement that the book should be graced by an Ellis jacket: no more photographs.
The germ for c&re’s bold idea might have come from Julian Huxley, who had a print of the ancient Abbotsbury Swannery in Dorset – arguably our oldest nature sanctuary – which at one point he was thinking of loaning for the jacket. The Ellises’ scene is not Abbotsbury, though there are some distant swans on the lake behind the keep-out sign. It is probably nowhere in particular. Reeds form a nice pattern for the foreground, while the lake is fringed with trees with distant hills: it is a nice, quiet bit of countryside that deserves conserving.
The art editor, Patsy Cohen, considered this and the jacket of Pesticides and Pollution to be ‘two most exciting designs’ (pc to c?, 21.10.66). Unfortunately the Nature Conservation jacket was too complex to print by the usual method and a coarse screen had to be used for the overlaps – the hills and the grey-green reeds. That of the reprinted edition is in brighter, harder tones than the first edition. There is no record of c&re’s reaction, but elsewhere they mention that the poor reproduction of the jackets lay behind the decision to change the way the jacket artwork was prepared. The first title to benefit from the revision was Man & Birds.
This, the darkest, most sinister of all the jackets, is an image of a world shrouded in smoke and poisonous fumes. Everything is wrong: the threatening sky is lavender and black, the crops are a horribly lurid turquoise, and the man with the knapsack sprayer is very sensibly sealed inside oilskins and a skull-like mask. The toxic chemicals enlisted in the service of man have come back to haunt us.
Pesticides were as much a public concern in the 1960s as global warming is today. Rachel Carson had been the first to warn of the insidious and frightening effects of poisons that did not decay but remained in the water or the soil, and were passed from plant to animal and so on in ever more concentrated form up the food chain to the top predators, like otters and peregrines, which suffered a lingering death. Kenneth Mellanby’s book was by no means another Silent Spring but a more sober and objective, even apologist, account of pest control and its environmental impacts. But C&RE captured the fear that underlay the science.
This is a busy but nicely balanced design. The pure white, conical jets of pesticide (on a windy day like this he should not be spraying at all) establish a diagonal along the shaft of the sprayer completed by the man’s partially visible helmet. Another plane is established by the horizontal plume of smoke which also adds an intriguing dimension to the spine. Yet another shape is formed by the curve of the hose. C&RE’s habitual restraint is evident in the use of strong tones: the only pure black on the design (apart from the title band) is on the glass of the man’s goggles.
There are two versions of this jacket whose artwork still survives. On the first, the sprayer’s oilskins are bright yellow, the crops a more realistic shade of green and the sky a deep but environmentally friendly blue. It is not clear why a new and bleaker version was done; it might have been to reduce printing costs, or because the blockmaker could not make the first design work. For some reason the artwork for this version is half as large again as the printed jacket. It conveys a vision of environmental hell in black, turquoise and lavender that is among the strongest jackets of the series, though we doubt whether it is many people’s favourite.
This alternative design for Pesticides and Pollution was in brighter colours. The attached printing instructions suggest that it was sent to the printers but rejected, possibly because the latter were unable to reproduce it adequately. A new, darker version prepared by C&KE in three colours became the printed jacket (artwork and printed jacket shown above).
Man & Birds (and The Mole) was the first jacket to be produced by the new method of colour separations. It was published in 1971, just in time for a decimal price sticker, and the bold, bright jacket forms a sad contrast to the lack of colour within the book.
The Ellises had become dissatisfied by the reproduction of recent jackets. They proposed to switch to a demanding process in which each colour would be hand-drawn on white paper with the ‘Pantone number’ of the required ink added in pencil. This method enabled the jackets to be printed in-house at the Collins Glasgow printing factory (though it is possible that the blocks were still made elsewhere). Most of the jackets from 1971 onwards were printed in four colours, and so needed a sequence of separations to be combined by camera during the printing process. Clifford compared the process to reading the score of a quartet. Although C&RE always prepared a colour sketch of the design to help the printer, the full design did not appear until the jacket was proofed. The method requires skill and experience on the part of the artists, but the results justified the extra work. Many feel that the New Naturalist jackets of the 1970s are among the best in the series, with their bright colours and bold designs.
Characteristically, c&re chose to symbolise ‘man’ by an artefact, in this case a church with a battlemented tower and flagstaff flying the flag of St George. The jacket uses four inks – red, black, blue and green – using overlaps to produce no fewer than three tones of black. The design also lets in a lot of white for the spire and the flag. ‘Birds’ are represented by rooks building their nests in the churchyard; one, with a twig in its beak, has flown uncomfortably close to us. Unusually, the title is picked out in red on black; the usual white lettering would in this case have detracted from the design.
This is a well-thought out design to inaugurate a new era. ‘I think it’s one of the most attractive there has ever been with this series,’ said the new Collins editor, Michael Walters. Maybe, but that demonic, red-eyed rook is slightly disconcerting.
Woodland Birds was on the first ‘wish list’ of New Naturalist titles made in 1943. Bruce Campbell had been chalked in as author, with John Markham, Eric Hosking and others providing specially commissioned photographs. Campbell did not find time to write the book. His successor as author, Brunsdon Yapp, did complete a book, but James Fisher found it too academic and stiffly written, and it was rejected (Birds and Woods by W. P. Yapp was published instead by Oxford University Press in 1962). It was only when Eric Simms accepted an invitation from Fisher to write the book that real progress was made. Simms’ book was in fact ready by 1968 although it was not published until 1971.
C&RE had designed a jacket for the Yapp book in 1955 (when it would have been around number 30 in the series) – ‘a delightful painting’ of a Great Spotted Woodpecker which sat in the bottom drawer at Collins for a decade and a half. When the time for its use finally arrived, c&re were asked to re-draw the design using the kind of colour separations that had proved so successful for Man & Birds. The new design differed in many small details, and the background was changed to an autumnal sepia and red in ‘recognition of the exceptional autumn of 1970’. The woodpecker’s distinctive red patch on the back of its head is carried over onto the spine – an idea the artists repeated on all their subsequent jackets featuring a bird. The same bright red was used for the title band and oval.
This jacket is to some extent a throwback to the early books in the series. The artists devoted close attention to the woodpecker’s eye and beak, and, for the purposes of projecting onto the spine, its head is angled back as if, in a split second, it will drum its beak into the flyleaf. The background is only sketched in, and the turquoise trees are, to my eyes at least, sketchy and lack conviction.
The Lake District was another fated title that progressed at a snail’s pace. It was among the projected National Park titles commissioned in the 1940s, in this case with the Carlisle-based naturalist Ernest Blezard as lead author and no fewer than five other contributors. The photographer J. A. Jenson had taken a set of ‘breathtakingly good’ glass slides for the book, but, unfortunately, the matching text proved less breathtaking, and was, in fact, never completed. Then W.H. Pearsall, the author of Mountains & Moorlands, took it up, but he never seemed to get very far with it either, and by the time of his death in 1964 had burned the draft in disgust, leaving only some notes behind. The book that finally emerged was basically Winifred Pennington’s (Mrs T.G. Tutin), with some help from specialists, including four NN authors, Gordon Manley, T.T. Macan, Winifred Frost and Derek Ratcliffe.
In Pennington’s hands, The Lake District was essentially a book about ecology and the physical landscape, though it was categorised as a ‘regional’ title. Had it been published in the late 1960s, as planned, it would probably have received a photographic wrapper. Fortunately it was now 1973 and the Board ‘agreed to revert to the Ellises for the jacket’. Their only request was that the design might somehow incorporate the National Park symbol, a graphic representation of mountains and lakes.
The Lake District jacket is a demonstration of the virtues of more transparent inks, and makes an interesting contrast with the same kind of scenery on the much more dour Mountain Flowers. There are mountains and lakes, to be sure, but in the foreground and around the shores of the lake lies a host of golden daffodils, whose effect is nicely captured by letting in white within the brightest of yellows. The lake ripples in the dappled light, a cloud passes overhead and a cold breeze flutters the flowers. The jacket is inviting and, despite its simplicity, true to nature. Unusually, the oval is not picked out in a contrasting colour but in a tone. In the right foreground, in a patch of grass free of daffodils, the artists drew the letters ‘WW’. This jacket was, after all, a homage to William Wordsworth.
For this jacket, C&RE produced one of their most luminous designs, a sunny close-up of a butterfly feeding on a daisy flower. Simply looking at it makes one feel happy. Unusually, the image is a magnification: the butterfly, a carefully rendered Adonis Blue, could in reality sit on a postage stamp.
It is a pity C&RE did not do more butterflies because this one is excellent: its black eye, flexible, zebra-striped antennae and powder-blue whiskers are well observed and lifelike, and the artists achieved a reasonably convincing brown by overlapping orange and blue. Most of the design is in three colours: blue, orange and yellow. The brightest, red, is reserved for the centres of the yellow daisies and the eye-catching spots on the butterfly’s hind-wing. This leaves the artists free to blare it out on a title band which almost calls for sunglasses.
The Pollination of Flowers was a considerable academic achievement, ‘a big, complex and valuable book’ in John Gilmour’s judgement. Had it been published twenty years earlier (or thirty years later), it would have been colourful inside as well as out. Michael Proctor, an expert plant photographer, had spent years patiently capturing the interactions of insects and flowers on colour film, often using state-of-the-art methods. But, because of the costs of colour printing, most of them were reproduced in monochrome (in Tokyo, as it happened). C&RE’s jacket is a reminder of what might have been.
Artists’ colour separations for the jacket, each drawing prepared for a specific colour.
This title was published out of sequence, shortly after Woodland Birds. The young Ian Newton, who later became associated more with sparrowhawks and other birds of prey, was a professional research ornithologist. His book is often hailed as the best bird book in the series, a standard-setter and, in the words of one reviewer, ‘a model of clear and logical writing’. Contracted to write the book at the end of 1968, Newton completed it in just over a year.
C&RE’s colourful jacket, which was done at about the same time as The Lake District, was based on studies of goldfinches feeding on the teasels in the couple’s front garden. The design intended the goldfinches to gleam brightly against a low-tone background of blues and greens, but, since the jacket was printed from colour separations, the blockmaker had no way of gauging the result until it was printed. He simply followed the artists’ instructions. The ‘pull’ (or proof) of the jacket was disappointing, for the ‘bilious’ green was too dominant and ‘oppressively egg-like’ (Michael Walters to Ian Newton, 17.8.72). The printer overcame the problem by reversing out the original yellow from the title lettering, and substituting a gentler tone of yellow to produce a softer, more olive-green title band. The result was a much cleaner-looking and nicely balanced design, a snapshot of life with the finches, full of movement and colour.
Everyone loved it. On 3 January 1972, Billy Collins wrote to say how much he admired the most recent designs: ‘I was looking with Patsy [Cohen] last week at your designs for The Lake District and Finches. I think they are two of the loveliest yet that you have done, and with Pollination and Woodland Birds they will make a tremendous display. I do think your wrappers are better than ever. We owe so much to you and I think it is marvellous after all these years that you should be keeping up such a terrific standard’ (wc to CE,3.1.72). This stamp of approval for the separations process must have been a great encouragement to Clifford and Rosemary at the point when they were about to retire from teaching.
The first ‘pull’ of the Finches jacket was an unattractive ‘bilious’ green.
In June 1972, Michael Walter warned Clifford that an unusual New Naturalist title was coming up, one which dealt not with wildlife or natural habitats but with words. ‘It will be fascinating to see what you eventually choose to feature in the jacket,’ he said.
C&RE’s solution was a kind of word puzzle. The jacket includes the Greek and Latin forms of the word ‘Geranion’, among a collage of flowers, seed-heads and the head and bill of a crane. Readers of the book will soon find out what it is all about in chapter one. But here, in a note Clifford made at the time, is the meaning behind the artwork:
‘Geranion – GERANIUM – Cranesbill
Modern botany began with a concern for old words.
‘The great renaissance herbalists did not presume to give new names to plants. As men of their time, they accepted unquestioningly the authority of the newly accessible classical authors. As herbalists, however, they had the special challenge of identifying the plants which their authorities had named. This identification is what William Turner wrote about in 1548 in his book, called, significantly, Names of Herbs.
‘One kind of plant has a long-beaked fruit “lyke Cranes heades”; the Greek name was geranion, from Geranos, a crane. The Latin form of that name was geranium and Turner identified “a kynde, called in English Pinke nedle or Storkis byll”. Of these English names, the first is not a bad one for, say, Herb Robert, “byll” whether, storkes or cranes, more closely confirmed the identification with geranium, and was therefore what was wanted in the sixteenth century. Since then the Latin name of this plant has continued to be Geranium robertianum.
‘The plant shown on the jacket is Meadow Cranesbill, Geranium pratense. This name has remained unchanged by botanists since its incorporation by Linnaeus into his systematic naming of plants, published in 1735. The bird’s beak is that of the Common Crane, whose scientific name is not Geranos in Greek but Grus in Latin.
‘Latin names are not necessarily scientific names, and geranium has interestingly different uses. From early in the seventeenth century, some newly discovered plants were increasingly brought to Europe from South Africa. These too were called geranium, although from the end of the century the common name for the African plants tended to be Storksbill, to distinguish them from the European Cranesbill…
‘The division which is still followed today by botanists, was made in 1787 by Charles Louis L’Heritier de Brutelle … L’Heritier named a new Order, Geraniaceae and divided this into three, keeping the name geranium for his first and typical genus (the native European cranebills), and calling the others after more birds with long beaks for which there were Greek names: pelargonium (pelargos, a stork) for the African genus and erodium (erodios, a heron) for the third genus, which disconcertingly has the popular name of Storksbill … His names, however, were arbitrary code words: the form of a stork’s bill did not especially resemble the fruit of a Pelargonium more than it did that of a Geranium or Erodium. This may partially explain why the new names did not affect popular usage.
‘Among the plants from South Africa there were some with flowers of a sensationally brilliant scarlet. Europeans soon found they could grow them in their new glass houses or in the windows of their homes and, when there was labour, bed them out in the summer. The many cultivated forms of these plants (which were some of L’Heritier’s pelargonium) are, nearly 200 years later, still known to most people by their Latin but now unscientific name of geranium’ (c ? 13.9.72).
Humphrey Hewer, the author of British Seals, probably never saw this beautiful jacket; he died suddenly in 1974, a few days after correcting the proofs of his book. Originally commissioned as a ‘special volume’, the book made it into the main series after the effective demise of the monographs.
The jacket is one of c&re’s undoubted masterpieces, giving a vivid sense of how a seal moves through the water, almost effortlessly. The blue and green inks, chosen for their transparency, create an aqueous effect that would have been impossible with the earlier generation of printing inks. The jacket needed only one minor amendment: the triangular highlight in the seal’s eye was made a little smaller. Seals was published at a time when each new Ellis jacket was often praised as the best ever. ‘The seals jacket is (in my view) the best you have ever done’, wrote Michael Walter. ‘It really is wonderful’ (Mw to c?, 24.1.73).
Clifford explained the background to the jacket in a letter to Michael Walter:
‘The seals are 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 [a book that Collins was hoping to publish]. 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. I don’t know whether the text is now complete, but the author may 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 … may support itself on its elbows like an old lady at her window-sill. Habitual, but, in English, nameless.’
A few technical details: the jacket was printed in four colours (black, ultramarine blue, cold slaty grey and pale blue-green, in that order) on ‘Snoscene’ and durasealed. The pages were printed by letterpress ‘on Esparto Antique Wove and sewn cased in standard green buckram on 1750 micron strawboards, blocked on the spine in Newvap.’
This title came about after James Fisher had heard a ‘brilliant’ talk by Max Hooper about how hedges could be dated by counting their constituent species of bushes and trees (a method now known as ‘Hooper’s Law’). Hooper was a scientist with the Nature Conservancy at Monks Wood Experimental Station in what was then Huntingdonshire. With his colleagues Norman Moore and Ernie Pollard (‘Mellanby’s Monks-wood minions’, as Fisher had laughingly referred to them), Hooper had made a detailed study of the importance of hedges for wildlife as well as their steep rate of decline; for at that time, progressive farmers were busy turning Huntingdonshire from a county of small fields and hedges into a prairie.
In the way of multi-author books, Hedges took several years to finish, but it proved a success and was reprinted three times. ‘After a few years in which the New Naturalists have seemed to tend towards the pedantic and the overspecialized’, wrote Jon Tinker in New Scientist, ‘the book is a welcome return to the series’ earlier aims of scientific knowledge set firmly in the context of nature.’
The jacket design, a May-time roadside in spring-fresh colours, turns on the two little dabs of pure bright colour on the Orange-tip butterfly contrasted with the greenery around it. Clifford’s instructions to the printer were to render the orange as brilliantly as possible. He was overheard repeating this over the telephone: ‘Remember the colour must be brilliant,’ said Clifford Ellis. ‘Brilliant.’
So it was, and so is the jacket. The composition uses fresh-green, dark green, pale blue-grey and orange, the latter otherwise used only for overlaps to obtain brown. The trick of carrying some of the fresh-green into the title band and oval works well. The butterfly flutters along a bank of frothy cow parsley and lady’s smock by a winding lane. In the distance are trees, hedges and the bare earth of newly planted fields. It is a May morning somewhere in England, and the landscape, though wholly man-made, is sweet and serene.
Unfortunately the jacket was sealed inside cheap plastic wrappers so we see this lovely scene as if through a dirty windowpane.
Pencil studies for the Hedges jacket, on cartridge paper, folded over to make two sheets, each 12.7 x 20.2 cm. They were used for the right top of the jacket design (above), above the title band.
‘We must get a good book on ants,’ said Sir Julian Huxley in 1961. The monograph, Ants (1953), by Derek Wragge Morley, was, for various reasons, not considered a good book. An eventual replacement author was found in Dr M.V. Brian, one of a band of Nature Conservancy scientists who made such an impression on the series in the late 1960s and ‘70s. Brian certainly knew his ants, but he was not blessed with the common touch. ‘He’s trying to make his writing a bit more appetising’, noted Kenneth Mellanby in 1972. Perhaps in consequence, the book was long delayed. C&RE designed the jacket in 1973 but the book was not published until 1977.
The jacket shows a wood-ant in monstrous close-up within a forest of grass-blades, looming towards the viewer with open jaws, ready to squirt us with formic acid. In what was to be his last letter to the Ellises, Billy Collins told them he thought this jacket was ‘the best you have ever done. It knocks the first Ants into a cocked hat’ (wc to CE, 26.3.74). It is not clear whether Collins was referring to the jacket of the monograph title, Ants, or to an earlier version of this jacket which shows a pair of ants. If the latter, some might disagree. While the ant on the printed jacket is undoubtedly more dynamic, the rejected version has its merits, notably in the carry-over of the ant’s red-glinting body onto the spine (that of the printed jacket has to make do with a trailing hind-leg).
Alternative jacket design with two ants. Full size, gouache on watercolour paper.
Another version of the Ants jacket tries the effect of the title band in red. Gouache and pencil on watercolour paper with pencilled notes.
A New Naturalist on birds of prey was always likely to be a popular title, and Leslie Brown’s book sold more than twenty thousand copies over ten years. The expatriate Brown lived in Kenya and made two extended trips to Britain in which he watched all the resident birds of prey, and caught up on the latest research (and that was a lot). He cheerfully predicted that he would be accused of ‘poaching’, and he was. Begun in 1969 and completed in 1972, the book was not published until 1976. Brown blamed the publishers; the publishers blamed Brown for being so far away and so seldom at home (at one point he was locked up in jail after a misunderstanding with the Somali authorities). The file on British Birds of Prey makes entertaining reading.
C&RE designed the jacket in 1971, and it received the by now customary applause from the publishers. Billy Collins thought it ‘quite beautiful, the best yet’. ‘I think it is one of the nicest in the series,’ agreed Michael Walter (MW to CE, 12.3.76). ‘It is a vindication of the printing method we evolved,’ replied Clifford. The softly drawn design is of an adult male sparrowhawk in full flight. The colours of the bird allow the background to be rendered in rich tones of reddish-brown and ochre (the base colours are orange, grey, ochre and black, the latter used only for overlaps). The hawk’s flight feathers extend the design above the title band while its long, barred tail carries over onto the spine. The latter is perhaps the weakest point of the design: the tail does not shout ‘bird of prey’ in the way that a beak or talon might have done.
From a collector’s point of view, a greater problem is that the red-brown ink chosen for the title band is light-sensitive. Moreover, the publishers seem to have economised by reprinting the jacket on thinner, inferior paper on which some of the rich-toned effect of the original has been lost.
Sketch of the design of the British Birds of Prey jacket, full size in gouache and pencil on thin cartridge paper.
How to give pictorial expression to so abstract a subject as inheritance? C&RE had two ideas. One was a pair of Peppered Moths, one in typical pale colours, the other the dark melanic form which predominated in industrial areas. The other was a ‘mouse in a remote place connected with past human activities’.
The choice of the mouse suggests that the Ellises had read at least bits of the book and were aware of the author’s research on island forms of mice and how they acquire distinctive characteristics over time. Human activity and the workings of time on inherited characters are symbolised by the far-off Viking longships and two beached ships’ hulls on shore. Near the mouse is a tuft of Sea Campions, another species well-studied by geneticists and one which had already been seen on a New Naturalist jacket (British Plant Life). The tones are cool – all greys and blue-greens except for the warm orange mouse dominating the design. As usual, the artists are sparing with black, reserving it for tiny patches of shadow.
Inheritance is a challenging book, possibly the toughest in the whole series. It makes genetic research as accessible as possible, but the publisher’s reader confessed she had hardly understood a word of it: ‘he’s done a convincing job but the subject seems to be occult’. Moreover, none of Berry’s subjects – rats, mice, snails, spittle-bugs – ‘have appeal except for their genes’. Anticipating poor sales, Collins printed this book on the cheap. The handsome black letterpress hitherto associated with the New Naturalist library was replaced by grey, eye-squinting, micro-printed filmset on thin paper.
The jacket, fortunately, escaped the penny-pinching measures. Clifford ‘is very fussy about [colour] matching, and knows a great deal about it,’ Michael Walter warned the printers. A proof came with the rather lame comment that, ‘we think it looks very nice’. Clifford replied: ‘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 549, i.e. if it had slightly more “Reflex Blue” and slightly less “Yellow”. I am glad you like it. p.s. Perhaps “COLLINS” should be a little larger and bolder.’
Original, much darker, sketch design of British Tits, full size, gouache on tracing paper with notes in pencil.
Pencil sketches of Blue and Great Tits made by c&re in February 1940 (44.5 x 54.5 cm).
Shortly before British Tits was published, the author, Chris Perrins, received a proof of the dust jacket in ‘a rather lurid yellow’. He did not much like it, and neither did the editors. ‘At least two of the reject jackets remained in the Collins office,’ recalled Perrins, ‘but when I tried to retrieve them they were no longer to be found … Are they still there, somewhere?’ Though the answer to that seems to be no, the rejected ‘yellow jacket’ seems to have been a printing error. By some mix-up over instructions, the design had been printed with glossy inks, and not matt as required. Clifford was ‘bewildered’ when he saw the proofs.
The printing of this jacket seems to have been troublesome, mainly because the background green is formed by overlapping blue and yellow. The design shows four species of tit feeding on a string of peanuts, based in part on pencil sketches the Ellises made by watching birds feed in their garden. When sent the proof, Clifford noted that ‘The blue is wrong. In combination with the yellow (which is right) it makes a green that is too dominating’ (cE to Libby Hoseason, 2.2.78). The solution was to substitute a deeper blue and a less gingery shade of buff. Though C&RE were not happy with the second proof either, the publishers refused to provide a third on the grounds of expense. Some may feel that the green is still too strong for the design to work really well.
Nevertheless, the jacket captures the distinctive ‘jizz’ of the birds: the acrobatics of the Blue Tits (one, whose head is slightly too big, has side-stepped onto the spine), the bold, slightly aggressive posture of the Great Tit, and the hesitant, almost apologetic presence of the Coal Tit, all faithfully rendered in blues, blacks and yellows, with a complicated overlap of orange, green and black for the duller feathers. Like real birds, it cheers us up.
Sketch for jacket design of British Thrushes with notes, pencil, coloured and black chalk on bond paper (20.3 x 12.7 cm).
Pencil sketch of Fieldfares by c&re, February 1940 (44.5 x 54.5 cm).
At a warm moment during that longest and hottest of summers in 1976, Clifford Ellis decided to ‘cool myself by thinking about NN Thrushes and snow’ (c? to Mw, 9.7.76). Though numbered after British Tits, this book was completed ahead of schedule and published the year before. The book continued the dominance of birds among the New Naturalist titles in the 1970s and ‘80s (8 out of 20 published between 1971 and 1985).
The chilly design of British Thrushes has a Blackbird, a Redwing, a Song Thrush and a Robin huddled together in the snow as though waiting for the crumbs to arrive on the bird table. The snowy backdrop allows the black and red colours to stand out strongly, while the pale parts of the birds merge into the snow. The blue-grey shadows are effective, and, characteristically, the strongest colour, yellow, is used sparingly, most notably for the blackbird’s beak and eye.
There was only one thing wrong with the jacket and it was the Robin, the nearest bird to the viewer. British Thrushes had deliberately confined the ‘small chat-like thrushes’, including the Robin, to a final chapter, and, rather belatedly, the publishers felt it needed a jacket in which the Robin did not appear. ‘That contentious robin’ obliged the artists to produce an alternative design featuring a large and dominating thrush projecting above the title band with more birds on the snowy path behind. Yet the design seemed less lively, and in the end the editor decided that the inclusion of the Robin did not really matter.
This was a bright and cheery design that could easily have doubled as a Christmas card. It is a shame the colours are light-sensitive, for faded spines lose the subtle flickers of colour and soon look washed out.
British Thrushes has one more claim on our attention: the text is illustrated by Robert Gillmor, the future New Naturalist jacket designer (he also helped illustrate Finches).
The Natural History of Shetland came about from an offer by R.J. Berry, author of Inheritance, to orchestrate contributions to a multi-author book about the Shetland Isles, with the help of Laughton Johnston, a former schoolmaster, poet and local naturalist. Collins turned the idea down, then changed its mind after optimistic predictions of local sales, plus some largess offered by BP on the condition that the book would be a New Naturalist.
Clifford Ellis had never been to Shetland, and for this jacket he took a BP-sponsored flight to Lerwick in 1979. In gaps between the rain he sketched clouds and landscapes. His resulting design also took in Shetland ponies, an oil rig, fishermen’s cottages and tugs butting into the tide along one of Shetland’s narrow ‘roes’. Fittingly for a time when the traditional life of Shetland was being transformed by North Sea oil, the jacket juxtaposes the old with the new.
The subject matter required a lot of blue, to which the artists added a warm grey that teased out extra colours when combined with blue and fresh green. C&RE were, as usual, economical with black, reserving it for a piebald pony, its mane blowing in the wind, and the hulls of the distant tugs. The sea shimmers, and the reflections merge imperceptibly with the hazy clouds of a Shetland morning. Yet the design hangs together less successfully than most Ellis designs, and the fuzzy grey head of a second pony is a serious weakness. It is probably there in an attempt to balance the detail on the spine, but looks like an afterthought. The earlier sketch reproduced here has the better balance.
Like other titles published in the first half of the 1980s, The Natural History of Shetland jacket was imprisoned inside a cheap plastic wrapper that did it no favours. The book was reprinted in 1986 on laminated paper, which gave a harder, brighter image but lacks the tonal quality that depends on a matt surface.
Alternative design for the jacket of The Natural History of Shetland, full size, gouache and pencil on watercolour paper.
Of all the long-legged shorebirds, there could never have been much doubt about which one would star on this jacket. The oystercatcher is the perfect subject for a jacket design, its pure black-and-white plumage contrasting with that big red powerful bill. The bird in effect chose the colour scheme, and the artists ‘job was to make a pleasing, eye-catching composition from it.
What C&RE did, after some experimentation, was to arrange five oystercatchers in such a way that only one bird is in full view. The other birds are partly outside the picture, and one is visible only by its bill. The effect is like a snapshot, or a detail taken from a larger composition, and emphasises that most waders are social birds. It is winter, so the birds wear white collars; Clifford referred to the design as a ‘Winter Synod of Anglican Oyster catchers’. The birds are softly drawn to increase the impact of that hard, dagger-blade of a beak coloured in the richest red the artists could find. Unusually, there are few overlaps; red, blue, pink and black are used mostly in pure form apart from some dark reflections on the water. The spine, in which the bird’s head prods downwards as if to spear the oval like a cockle, is particularly effective. The result was, in the editor’s words, ‘rather striking’.
Charlotte Ellis remembered that this jacket was designed after a family trip to the Camargue in France.
Original artwork for the Waders jacket with printing instructions.
A version of the jacket without title band redrawn by c&re for the author.
William Condry wrote this book swiftly, and perhaps effortlessly, drawing on half a lifetime’s experience of roaming the Welsh hills and coast. In the view of his assigned editor, Margaret Davies, ‘Bill Condry has done [the book] as I hoped he would. It is so readable and thoughtful, and will make a very good volume in the series. I like his evocation of habitats, and readers will appreciate so much personal observation.’
The first jacket design, for which only a colour sketch survives, shows a dipper perched on a rock by a waterfall against a dramatic mountain background. It might have led to an outstanding jacket (with the waterfall running down the spine), but for some reason it was rejected. Instead, the artists decided to create a bird’s-eye view of a pair of red kites circling over a Welsh valley, their forked tails splayed. Again, the basic idea is good: the birds and the U-shaped valley say ‘Wales’ as clearly as anything could, but the design as it appears on the printed jacket seems sketchy, as if it had been done in a hurry and left only half finished.
The colours, fresh green, blue-grey and reddish-brown, harmonise well. The design allows the tail of the lead kite to overlap on to the spine, but instead of the expected rich red tone we find only the pale under-feathers. The birds are freely drawn to the point of crudity, especially the primary wing-feathers. And, with so many recent bird titles, one might question the choice of yet another bird as the main subject.
Exceptionally, first edition copies have the figure ‘66’ stamped on the buckram spine of the book.
Rejected alternative jacket design for The Natural History of Wales with a dipper perched by a waterfall. Full size, gouache on tracing paper.
Like Waders, this jacket used a lot of pink. This time the colour (in a slightly colder tone than on Waders) is used to create a vivid sunset (or sunrise?) against which the lapwings swoop past on their broad, crooked-back wings. The jacket uses a remarkable combination of colours – pink, blue, green and brown – though the design fails to connect wildlife and farming quite as clearly as, say, the jacket of Birds & Men. Reserving brown for the lead bird’s beak and eye allowed the artists to borrow it for the title band and oval without distraction. Its wings stretch further than nature meant them to go, but they do give a vivid impression of a bird on the verge of flight.
The lapwings on the jacket of Farming and Wildlife were inspired by the flocks that visited the winter fields below the Wiltshire downs close to the Ellises’ home. Around this time, their daughter Charlotte had spotted a ploughed field covered with ‘peewits’. She took Clifford to see them in her new, bright-green Citroën 2cv, but each time they stopped to allow Clifford to sketch the scene, the birds took off. It was the memory of the great flock of skittish lapwings rising from the stubble that seems to have inspired the jacket of Farming and Wildlife.
Clifford himself said of this scene that ‘the birds themselves “know” about tone values. When they are on the ground they have v. little anxiety if you pass in a car. But if you are on foot you are dangerous, so they turn away and the white plumage (and the birds) disappear until they have run a safe distance; then they take flight, and white plumage reappears, and nicely visible, they are suitable for a book jacket’ (c? to Libby Hoseason, 8.2.81).
‘Mammals 2’ was an update of the classic New Naturalist British Mammals, published more than thirty years before. Remarkably, both books were by the same author, by now in his eighties. This time Leo Harrison Matthews chose to cover the field by topic rather than by species; the new book was discursive, review-like, and, above all, short – Mammals in the British Isles is only half the length of British Mammals.
Its jacket was among a batch of designs c&re completed back in 1974, long before the book’s publication. The colours are rich and bright, and the forms looser and freer than ever. Two young stoats are racing through a tangle of bramble, the rich, warm browns of the animals matched by the autumnal foliage. Perhaps they have heard the trilling call of their mother announcing she has caught a mouse and are racing to get there first. The surprise colour is the bright blue. It has no particular function in the design except as shadow, but it complements the brown unexpectedly and enriches the tones.
Jonathan Gibbs, writing in the Financial Times, thought the ‘cutesy weasels’ [sic] ‘look as if they might be a detail from a medieval wall-hanging’ and found the artists’ ‘Arts-and-Craftsy aesthetic’ ‘at once archaic and modernist’. This design is best appreciated at an angle, where the head of the leading stoat curls around the spine to complete the sinuous curve of its outline. The effect is spoiled once his poor, light-sensitive little head turns to pale brown.
Artists’ reference sheet for Reptiles and Amphibians with colours and selected Pantone numbers on note pad (15 x 10 cm).
Like Mammals in the British Isles, this book is an update of a classic New Naturalist title, Malcolm Smith’s The British Amphibians and Reptiles (Deryk Frazer had taken the latter through several revisions after Smith’s death in 1958, and so was the obvious choice for his successor). This book was the last in the series to be printed in the traditional text format. It was also the last-but-one Ellis jacket.
C&RE designed it in 1982. Having put a reptile on the jacket of the Smith book, they decided it was the turn of the amphibians and chose a common frog. The animal is in the water with just its head poking above the surface and the rest of its body reduced to a blurred pale green outline. The effect is rather comic. The lower half of the jacket is devoid of detail leaving the focus on the frog’s head, plus a mish-mash of deeper tones above the deep green band. In response to a request for a reptile as well as an amphibian, the artists added a row of lizard spots to the spine.
‘Your colleague’s request for a reptile on the spine may be met by the placing there of an enlargement of part of the dorsal pattern of a Sand Lizard,’ explained Clifford. ‘This distracts less from the frog on the front than a representation of a whole reptile would be. Anyhow they are all too lengthy – as this soon will be. p.s. Nowadays everybody is familiar with reptile skin, real or artificial.’ I wonder if this is true; I had always assumed the spots were meant to be frog spawn.
C&RE’s penultimate jacket was published on shiny paper which does not suit it. The editor, Libby Hoseason, had asked the artists whether they preferred ‘to show us your colour roughs first to spike the grumble-brigade’s guns, or proceed direct to separations. Could you let me know?’
Orkney and Shetland are, in effect, companion volumes (though Orkney is also often paired with Warblers as the first two books with a paperback edition, and also as the two rarest and most expensive hardbacks in the series). They are by the same author-editor, Professor ‘Sam’ Berry, and have the shared stated aim of relating the natural history of the islands to their rapidly changing economic circumstances. Both books were sponsored by North Sea oil giants, in the case of Shetland by BP, for Orkney by Occidental Oil. But, after his experiences wrestling with a multitude of authors for Shetland, Berry decided to write Orkney alone, ‘as Winston Churchill wrote his books: commission individual chapters from experts, and then re-write them into a flowing whole’.
For their last jacket for the New Naturalist library, Clifford and Rosemary Ellis drove all the way to northern Scotland where they caught the ferry to Orkney; their trip, made in late summer 1983, was sponsored by Occidental Oil to whom Clifford afterwards presented an invoice for £205. Among other things they sketched and photographed North Ronaldsay sheep ‘feeding on kelp torn loose by storm and exposed at low tide’. Not content with that, Clifford sketched more Orkney sheep at the Rare Breeds Survival Centre in the Cotswolds.
Sam Berry had ‘a panic’ when he saw the roughs of the jacket as the sheep’s face was shown as white, and not their usual pale-brown. But after enquiry he was assured that their faces go white by the end of winter, and that some are that way all year round, ‘so the cover is fine’.
Is the cover fine? It is certainly ingenious and economical with colour; the bright green (perhaps too bright?) of the title band is otherwise used only for overlaps. The top register with terns flying along the coast is pleasing, and the colours are soft and pleasant to the eye. But the central character, the sheep facing us, doggedly chewing its fragment of weed, seems oddly flat and two-dimensional, curly ram’s-horns notwithstanding. On the ‘colour separations’ of the artwork the effect works splendidly, but somehow the charming features of the sheep were lost in translation. The ‘rough’ of the jacket was hung on the wall of Crispin Fisher’s office at Collins.
Variant design of Orkney jacket, full size, gouache and pencil on watercolour paper.
This is, perhaps, a jacket for the connoisseur. It is also a jacket for the rich, for Fine copies of Orkney have fetched up to £2,000 in recent book auctions. The full design was confined to the tiny hardback edition of only 725 copies (plus 500 rebound copies with laminated jackets); the paperback distorts the design by omitting the spine and its crucial completion of the ram’s horn, while printing it on inappropriate glossy boards.
Orkney is also, in retrospect, a sad jacket, for it was the Ellises’ last completed design for the series. Clifford and Rosemary Ellis had designed 86 jackets over nearly forty years. Clifford’s death, in March 1985, aged 78, after a short illness, was therefore the end of an era. Rosemary was invited to design the next jacket, for British Warblers, alone, but declined. ‘Reluctantly I am writing to say that at the moment I have not the courage, the heart or the time to undertake the jacket,’ she wrote. ‘I am sad about this as the New Naturalist books are part of my life.’ Crispin replied that their work had been part of his life too: as the son of James Fisher, they had been part of his upbringing. ‘Your work has a freshness and quality as modern today as it was 43 years ago,’ he added, ‘and that can’t be said for any other graphic designer I know.’
This might have been the moment for a radical redesign of the series in favour of the photographic jackets so long hankered for by some of the editors. To his eternal credit, Crispin Fisher saw absolutely no reason to change. He had no doubt, either, about whom he wanted to take over the task of producing jacket designs for the series.
Over to you, Robert Gillmor…