THE MONOGRAPHS
A parallel New Naturalist series on single species or related groups of species was already under active discussion as early as 1945, three years before the first volume was published. While the mainstream New Naturalist volumes, at least in the early years, were intended to deal with broad subjects such as wild flowers, insects or National Parks, the new books, to be called ‘monographs’, would focus on specialist subjects such as ants, British reptiles or even single species such as the Badger or the Fulmar. They would, of course, share the same high standards of the main series and benefit from the library of colour images assembled by Collins and their partners, Adprint.
In practice, all but one of the first six published monographs was about species of birds. The exception was The Badger. A schoolmaster in the Cotswolds, Ernest Neal, had, alone or with a team of enthusiastic young biology students, turned himself into, in his editors’ words, ‘a patient watchman’ of badgers, as well as ‘a cunning photographer, an ingenious detective and a careful judge’. He had spent a prodigious amount of time observing wild badgers and their ways, and he embodied the kind of naturalist the editors were looking for: a good observer, scientifically inclined, enthusiastic, outdoorsy and literate. Like many succeeding New Naturalist monographs, his was essentially the story of one man’s passion for a wild animal.
The monographs were envisaged as relatively short books of 50,000 words or so, and in a smaller format than the main series. In February 1947, Clifford and Rosemary Ellis were asked to design jackets for the series. The jacket would need to declare the book’s affinity with the New Naturalist library while clearly distinguishing them. The decision to put the title inside a coloured oval and to include a logo based on the letters NMN seems to have been taken in-house, though the actual logo was designed by c&re. The jackets would be produced and printed in the same way as the parent series, in three or four colours.
The Badger jacket shows two striped heads emerging from the darkness, with a single, broad, clawed foot in the foreground. The colours – black, grey and pink – are appropriate to an animal normally seen only in the twilight around dusk; the pink is used mainly in overlaps to obtain a warm grey-brown and for the highlights on the animal’s claws. In pure form it makes an eye-catching colour for the title, while the head of the second badger, seen from the front, produces an effective image for the spine. Unfortunately, the artists had been told that the book would be about an inch wide when it was barely half that. Hence the second badger’s eyes are barely visible when the book is on the shelf. The Board minutes record that ‘everyone thought [the jacket] was excellent’.
The sales of The Badger made a promising start to the monographs. Published in the late autumn of 1948, it remained in print for nearly thirty years, was translated into German and Japanese, and ran through five Collins editions as well as a massmarket Pelican paperback.
The Redstart was the record of an Oxford academic’s close study of a bird over five years while he was a prisoner of war in Germany. No one would normally have chosen a redstart as the most commercially viable subject for a monograph, but, of course, the editors were not really choosing subjects: they were choosing authors. John Buxton was a distinguished English scholar and a leading amateur ornithologist.
Studies of redstart in pencil with pencilled notes, coloured pencil and gouache on cartridge paper (27.5 x 18.5 cm).
Rough watercolour sketches for The Redstart (203 x 33 cm), full size, gouache on watercolour paper, and the printed jacket.
For the jacket c&re made a number of pencil sketches based on photographs sent to them by the author. They show the bird full length and in close-up, with detailed notes on the colours. A sketch of the bird’s head was transferred to the spine of the book, where it peeps through a hole in the wood. The full-length bird was shown in a more dynamic posture, emphasising the brightly coloured tail (the ‘start’ in ‘redstart’ comes from ‘steort’, Old English for ‘tail’). C&RE chose a saturated rusty-red for the tail and teased out a range of tones for the background, a tangle of branches and hollow timbers. The printers experienced trouble in getting it exactly right, but the result was pleasing enough. The cock bird has returned to the nest with food; it might have been appropriate to show its mate waiting expectantly in its nest-hole, but this bird is in fact another cock redstart, perhaps the same one about to leave the nest. Completed in February 1948, the jacket not only places the redstart in its natural woodland setting but portrays an aspect of its behaviour.
John Buxton liked it, especially the spine: ‘The head of the cock on the spine, popping out of its hole, is exactly right and most delightful!’
Stephen Moss, author, broadcaster and producer of BBC Television’s Springwatch – as well as ‘an inveterate NN collector’ – writes:
‘My favourite jacket? For me, it has to be one of the monographs, but which one? That pair of Hawfinches staring at each other like gargoyles? The citrus tones of The Yellow Wagtail, with a herd of cows grazing behind a giant bird? Or the equally vivid yellows of The Wren, whose subject virtually hops off the page? In the end, it has to be The Redstart, John Buxton’s remarkable account of how he found freedom within a German pow camp by watching these birds. It was one of the first New Naturalists I bought. The image is so vibrant it is almost too big for the book, and the tail has to carry round to the flyleaf. The bright colours and the glint in the bird’s eye bring the image to life. Looking at it afresh, the jacket conjures up memories of my all-too-infrequent sightings of this little gem of a bird. Simply magical.’
Artwork and printing instructions for The Wren.
Though given the number ‘3’ in the series, The Wren was in fact the eleventh monograph in order of publication. The author had written a very long book about this smallest of birds. ‘Who would read monographs of this length’, wondered the non-ornithologist, Dudley Stamp, when he saw the size of the manuscript. William Collins was of similar mind, and demanded cuts. Even so, the setting costs exceeded the likely profits on the entire edition of 3,000. The ensuing controversy delayed the book’s publication for several years.
For this unloved book C&RE designed one of their loveliest jackets, a study in browns and yellows of a wren’s nest inside the wooden diamond of a trellis fence. The latter detail may have been inspired by the author’s lyrical description of the moment when, as wartime bombers roared off into the winter night, ‘a small bird [alighted] on the trellis outside and then [flew] up into the ivy on the wall’. The parent bird holds a tiny scrap in its beak which seems hardly enough to feed the four nestlings, all eyes and yellow gape as they beg for food from the spine of the book. The jacket, which was printed by Odhams of Watford, needed some adjustment, especially in the liveliness of the yellow, but the result pleased everybody.
Like The Fulmar, The Wren was published in standard New Naturalist size. More than most titles, it is hard to find this jacket in fresh condition since the pale colours become grubby with age, and it is prone to chipping and foxing. The condition of the average Wren jacket suggests that, vade Dudley Stamp’s comment, those 3,000 or so people who bought The Wren did indeed read it.
Though it comes after The Redstart and The Wren, The Yellow Wagtail was in fact the first bird monograph to be completed and published. C&RE designed the jacket in spring 1948, possibly from photographs sent by the author (though the liveliest pictures in this book are the colour paintings by Edward Bradbury). The jacket shows a cock bird in summer plumage foraging in a field with cows grazing in the background. A second bird with a darker eye patch, perhaps its mate, makes an appearance on the spine. The background in tones of brown and green were calculated to make the bright yellow bird stand out all the more effectively.
James Fisher suggested a few improvements. The legs should be more prominent, and ‘the whole of the claw should be flat on the ground’, odd as it looked. ‘The claw,’ he explained, ‘is lifted off in one movement, not as in walking, and the back leg is a little higher’ (JF to CE, 29.9.48).
Colour sketch (incomplete), full size, gouache and watercolour on layout paper with note.
The full design of The Yellow Wagtail, including modification of legs and feet, full size, gouache and watercolour on watercolour paper, with printing instructions in pencil.
Full size pencil study of Yellow Wagtail on layout paper.
Unfortunately the printing let the design down. The intended tones were muddied and gave the impression of a bird wandering the field after sundown, or under the blackest of storm clouds. This made the yellow, sun-like, oval look bizarre.
Two sets of proofs were made in February 1949, both unsatisfactory. ‘It is, if you will forgive my saying so, partly your fault,’ scolded Ruth Atkinson, ‘because you used two browns, and I have tried to keep to four printings, and not five. I think we must stick to four for these Monographs, of which we do not print very large quantities … we will use the extra colour if it is absolutely necessary’ (RA to ce, 2.2.49).
It seems that this jacket was printed to demand; my copy has 90p printed on the flyleaf, indicating it was printed after decimal currency was introduced in 1971.
‘Burn the jacket,’ advised the naturalist Anthony Buxton. Reviewing the book for The Spectator in December 1951, he liked the book but hated C&RE’s design: ‘It is a brutal shame,’ he railed, ‘on the author (and on a greenshank) to have clothed this book in a vulgar jacket produced apparently by a pair of schoolchildren who have never seen the bird and never learned to draw.’ Raleigh Trevelyan responded with a pledge to take ‘great care in future that no New Naturalist books go to Anthony Buxton’ (RT to cE, 14.1.52).
The Greenshank jacket fell foul not of any inability to draw but to cost constraints and inexperience. Inspired by some posters by Charles Tunnicliffe for the RSPB that had been printed in only two colours, Trevelyan had asked the artists ‘to have a shot at doing this design in two colours, to be reproduced in line’. If successful, the new, cheaper method might ‘start a new style for the series and for you to abandon your policy of natural colours’ (RT to CE, 21.2.51).
One of these colours would have to be green so the other would have to be black, or at least a contrasting dark colour. Such penny-pinching made it difficult to fit in with the author’s suggestion of a greenshank displaying on a dead stump against a background of hills and pinewoods (with two more in flight in the background). The artists did, however, take note of his further suggestion of a bird standing in water emphasising ‘the longish bill and green legs’.
This became the ‘green shank’ on the spine, a long green leg with the oval doing duty as the bird’s body. C&RE did their best to enliven the design with tints and cross-hatching; ‘the blockmaker must not attempt retouching,’ warned Clifford, ‘Our scribble in the lower part of the green block should be allowed to produce its own texture in the block’ (c?, 24.3.51). The artists had departed from their usual policy, as requested, they produced colour separations to make life easier for the printer. The results were disappointing. Perhaps the poor reproduction was just as well for it stopped Trevelyan’s dream of cheap two-colour jackets in its tracks.
Anyone who adopted Anthony Buxton’s suggestion and burned the jacket was saying goodbye to around £150 in today’s prices.
Des Thompson, son of the author and himself a distinguished ornithologist, writes:
‘I don’t remember my father commenting on the jacket, which is surprising since he tended to hold strong views on most matters – including the feel of his books. My mother thinks the jacket is fine, but says my father would have had to make do with it anyway, because Billy Collins tended to get his way on such matters.
‘For my part, I dislike almost every aspect of it except one: the emphasis on the streaks on the bird’s breast and neck feathers, and the exaggerated white fringes of the scapulas – but even here the detail is wrong, and the use of lime-green on the coverts and bill is hopeless (it implies they are the same colour as the olive-green legs, which they are not). The eye is too big, the flecks under the eye do not exist, the tertials and primaries are absent, the undertail-coverts are too prominent, and the leg is far too thick.
‘When it comes to the backdrop, the greenshank is set against cross-hatched water, and the land behind has closely packed, vertical lines running into darkness, and descending from green, black and streaky-white beams, presumably depicting the elements of water, land and sky. There are no hints of pine trees, of rocks, or of the spacious landscapes occupied by this most graceful, excitable and agile of birds.
‘No, sorry, in my view this is a disappointing jacket. I should say, though, that my brother Pat does like it, commenting that “the key thing you notice is the green legs – a deliberate corruption of the bird’s legs and a play on the colour and name. It is actually very effective – it screams ‘green’ at you!”’
In February 1947, James Fisher wrote to Clifford to tell him of a book he was in the middle of writing. This was The Fulmar, the fruits of Fisher’s obsession with ‘the ghost-grey bird and green islands in grey seas’. The book was, according to his obituary, ‘one of his proudest achievements – an extraordinary accumulation of information’ – all 500-odd pages of it (and that was without the 2,378 supporting references!).
For the first version of the jacket, drawn in the standard monograph format, Fisher thought the artists had captured the bird well but asked for some changes: the wings should not overlap or cross; the beak should be a little longer and more hooked; the spot by the bird’s eye should be more pronounced; and the egg between its feet should be brought further forward. A little yellow webbing on the feet might be a good idea, and, suggested Fisher, they might consider including a few primroses dotted around the ledge as they are on St Kilda.
Their design had to be adjusted in any case for the new, larger format necessary for this very long book. It incorporated most of Fisher’s alterations except for the primroses. ‘We tried primroses but they seemed to break things up too much,’ said Clifford. The jacket’s greys, blues and greens are soothing to the eye, though the bird on the spine is more manic. c&re’s fulmar is nesting at St Kilda, the ancestral home of British fulmars. In the background are three islets in a row, intended to represent the islets of Boreray, Stac Lee and Stac an Armin. Sixty years after publication, most Fulmar jackets have toned spines but that now grubby bird was once as white as snow.
James Fisher was delighted with it: ‘I would like to thank you personally for the cover,’ he wrote. ‘You can imagine what it means to me to have a cover of which, as a naturalist, I can approve. You have got the spirit of the bird absolutely, and it was a delightful touch to put in the shadowy figure of Boreray in the background – a touch that will be happily understood by the few who know it. It is a wonderful cover, and I wanted to tell you I thought so’ (JF to CE,30.9.1952).
The artwork for The Fulmar jacket was reputedly given away as a prize for the annual Bird Race in 1992.
William Collins was at a loss knowing what to do with this brilliant, oddball book. Under the working title of Parasites of Birds, the book was provisionally listed as a title in the mainstream series (it would have been New Naturalist No. 22). Later Billy Collins got cold feet about publishing a book on such a specialist subject, especially as the cost of production would be high in relation to likely sales. To begin with, C&RE were asked to design a jacket in the usual way; ‘we would like a cuckoo on the front,’ said Trevelyan, ‘as we feel anything else might be a little macabre!’ (RT to CE, 22.5.51). As with The Greenshank, they were asked to do the job in two colours, but this time without using colour separations. C&RE thereupon made a few preliminary pencil sketches for a cuckoo jacket.
Unfortunately, the book was in production at a time when the Ellises were busy with a multitude of other New Naturalist jackets. Because some of these were urgent, they were told not to bother, after all, with the jacket. We will ‘think up an ordinary line jacket for this book’, said Trevelyan (RT to CE, 3.7.51).
Poor Fleas, Flukes! Miriam Rothschild had independently commissioned another artist to design a jacket for it but was denied ‘the pretty jacket I hankered after’ (Marren, 2005). The book was published as a one-off ‘special volume’ in a cheap plain wrapper. Collins was completely wrong about the book’s appeal. It sold out in two weeks.
Ants was the first monograph to be written; a version of it was ready in 1945. Unfortunately Wragge Morley’s text was not peer-read by a fellow ant expert and the book, which was not published until 1953, received several poor reviews pointing out errors in the text. Legend has it that this book was thereupon withdrawn from sale. There is nothing about that in the record, and the truth seems to be that the book sold out quite quickly and, like many of the monographs, was not reprinted.
Ants was another jacket that ran into trouble through various would-be cost-saving expedients. Raleigh Trevelyan had ‘played around a little’ with the artwork, and the only way he was able to move and reduce the size of the title ovals was to add grey paint to the top and bottom (RT to CE, 17.12.51). Then, unasked, the blockmakers at Odhams further touched up the original design. The jacket was printed by the ‘line method’ which filtered out the colours and resulted in harsh colour gradations with ‘everything very sharp and black’ (RT, ibid.).
Despite all this, the jacket was thought ‘extremely attractive’. C&RE’s ant is a red-brown wood-ant in its forest of grass blades, rearing up threateningly with open jaws. The sunny yellow of the title spot is echoed by lichen on the stone and the sunlight streaming through the grass.
Niko Tinbergen is the only Nobel Prize-winner among New Naturalist authors; his book, originally titled A Herring Gull’s World, is perhaps the most influential, though not the most commercially successful, title in the series. It is a classic study in animal behaviour revealing a kind of avian psychology and the ways in which the gulls communicate with one another, with their mates and with their chicks. Despite its specialised nature, the book was true to the precepts of the series, being based on observation and simple experiments, and written in nontechnical language.
Colour and pencil sketches for the jacket of The World of the Herring Gull (16.9 x 13.7 cm) and the printed jacket.
The editors (Sir Julian Huxley was an eminent animal behaviourist) realised they had a winner on their hands, at least in academic terms. In 1953, however, this represented a new kind of book, and ‘the sales people’ wondered whether it was right for the series. Sensing that it was written primarily for university and college courses, they argued for publication outside the series, and in a plain wrapper. But, at Huxley’s insistence, Billy Collins was persuaded to include it among the monographs, and an Ellis jacket was commissioned for it.
This subject interested Clifford, and the jacket he and Rosemary designed deliberately avoids showing us a straightforward bird portrait. Instead we are brought eye-to-eye with a ‘vocalising’ gull. There is no contact between bird and viewer: this is a wild bird with strange, alien motivations and habits, and to find out just how strange, says the jacket, you will need to open the book. Colour sketches survive, showing how the artists experimented with gulls’ heads before arriving at a simple yet effective way of conveying the contents of the book. Their only mistake, if mistake it was, was to overestimate its width, so that most of the eye of the second gull misses the spine.
The jacket was a success. ‘Everyone is v. thrilled by [it],’ said Trevelyan, ‘and we think it is a real winner. I consider the production has turned out well’ (RT to ce,4.9.53).
A book about the invisible viruses that cause disease in animals and plants was never going to be a winner. Like Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos, the title was a clear attempt to make the book sound intriguing. The ‘sales people’ had even more doubts about this book than with Fleas, Flukes, and it was only included in the series at the Board’s insistence. Collins compromised by calling it a ‘special volume’ and denying it an illustrated jacket (and allowing it only one measly colour plate). The design of the Mumps, Measles jacket is the same as Fleas, Flukes, but, since this is a shorter book, it is in smaller ‘monograph’ format.
Colour sketch of calling gull, gouache on buff sugar paper (18.5 x 15.3 cm).
Unlike Fleas, Flukes, it sold slowly, perhaps mainly to libraries and agricultural colleges. The book was out of stock by the end of the 1950s and was not reprinted.
Most people like this lively jacket with its riot of eyeballs and beaks. The cue for the design was a remark by Raleigh Trevelyan that ‘an ordinary heron standing on one leg in the middle of a river is rather too trite. Can you let us have a design of a heronry?’ he asked, adding: ‘This might be rather unusual and striking … I don’t suppose it would be possible for you to do it in two colours this time?’ (RT to CE, 1.4.53).
Design sketches for The Heron jacket. Gouache and pencil on thin card (24.5 x 30.5 cm).
The last time c&re had designed a two-colour jacket, for The Greenshank, the result had been disappointing. Fortunately, the heron is essentially a two-tone bird in shades of grey, black and white. The bird’s characteristic neck pattern might look nice on the spine suggested the author, Frank Lowe.
The artists’ solution was to show the head of the parent bird on a horizontal plane with the begging chicks pointing upwards. It made a pleasing pattern and they made the most of the chick’s fuzzy heads and fishy white eyes. There was just room to show the heron’s characteristic hackle feathers on the bottom right. The jacket was printed by Odhams, and although it uses only dark colours, grey and black, the result is far from gloomy.
In general birds (and reptiles) lend themselves better to jacket designs than mammals. The modelling of a mammal’s head (unless shown in silhouette) is difficult to achieve with the flat planes of lithography, and fur is harder to suggest than scales or feathers.
The Squirrels jacket bears this out. c&re had been given the choice of grey or red squirrels (with a request from the author that the former be ‘not too ugly’). They chose the red, but the anatomy is all wrong: the eyes are too far forward and too close together, and the skull is too narrow. And the tail looks as though it is on fire. This was a pity since the background to the image is rich and varied, with the branches and trunk nicely marbled with tints of red, ochre and black.
The printer had used a heavy tone of brown for the squirrel, giving an unwanted sense of weight. ‘Odham’s effort seems a bit of a shock,’ said Raleigh Trevelyan (RT to c?, 9.6.54). The blockmaker rejoined that the squirrel design was one of the most complicated he had ever had, and the colours were difficult to match exactly.
Despite these troubles, the Squirrels jacket, along with Sea-Birds, was exhibited by the National Book League as one of the best of that year’s book jacket designs.
For this austere monograph, C&RE drew a very uncuddly rabbit. To further rub in the message that the New Naturalist rabbit was not at all like Beatrix Potter’s, a skull sits on the spine. The rabbit of 1956 was both a serious agricultural pest (the book’s working title had been The Rabbit and the Rabbit Problem) and a victim – of myxomatosis. Hideously deformed, dead or dying rabbits were being found everywhere. Collins rushed out the book to cash in on the myxomatosis scare.
The preliminary sketches show that the artists intended from the start to portray a frontal view of the animal’s head. They are drawn from life with careful attention given to the lashes, whiskers and nostrils. The final design is more stylised, with extraneous detail stripped away, leaving dark eyes staring blankly at the reader, and a pair of outsize ears supporting the oval of the title.
Pencil and colour studies for The Rabbit jacket: three skulls with pencil notes (21 x 14 cm).
Rabbit’s head, full size as on jacket.
Pencil design for the jacket on typing paper, full size.
Colour sketch, full size, gouache on layout paper.
‘Congratulations on The Rabbit, which is enthusiastically accepted,’ wrote Raleigh Trevelyan (RT to ce, 2.9.55). The National Book League chose this jacket, along with Mountain Flowers, for their exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1956. ‘Studies and colour sketches for The Rabbit and The Folklore of Birds’ were also exhibited in 1990 in ‘The Decorative Beast’ by the Crafts Council, London.
This misfit of a book is the odd-man-out of the monographs and a strange subject for a New Naturalist monograph. The idea was to include it as a ‘special volume’ as a kind of pendant to London’s Natural History. William Collins was reluctantly persuaded to publish it once the London Natural History Society undertook to purchase some for sale to its members. As the author-editor Richard Homes justifiably exclaimed, the offered terms ‘seem incredibly hard bargaining for a firm of your standing’, but, even so, Collins made only £85 profit from it (some monographs, notably The Wren, made a loss).
The book was eventually re-published on a more satisfactory basis by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1964. But, of course, the book the collectors want is not this one but its ill-fated New Naturalist predecessor in its plain green wrapper.
Yet another uncommercial book about a little-known bird: no wonder Billy Collins was losing faith in the monographs. For The Hawfinch, it seems that someone (not he) was determined to cut their losses by printing the book on the cheap. The paper quality was poorer than usual so that the print showed through at the chapter ends, and Keith Shackleton’s beautiful scraperboard drawings reproduced poorly. To add insult to injury, the pages were accidentally undercut leaving the page trim (and hence the binding) slightly smaller than the standard monograph size.
The economy extended to the jacket. Few exactly match the size of the book, and most are slightly shorter as though the jacket had shrunk. Towards the end of the print-run it seems the supply ran out, and, reluctant to print more, Collins wrapped the remaining stock in green ‘sugar paper’ (the internal file calls them ‘plain cellophane wrappers’). The design itself was generally admired: ‘we are delighted with The Hawfinch, wrote Trevelyan (RT to c?, 6.6.56). Unfortunately, the rich reddish-brown ink is light-sensitive and most copies of The Hawfinch now show some fading on the spine.
C&RE’s design focuses on the bird’s most notable feature, its massive bill, capable of cracking cherry stones. They used a rich chestnut for the bird’s head which almost glows against a dark grey background. Two hawfinches glower at one another, their beaks almost touching. What are they doing? Read on.
Andrew Branson, naturalist and publisher of British Wildlife, writes:
‘These two hawfinches, caught in a curious “kissing” of bills, have nestled on my bookshelves since the mid-1960s. Like all great jacket artwork, the image is immediately arresting, but also puzzling. Are the birds sparring males or a male courting his partner? The grotesque bills are the focus of the design, their dense outlines arching across the jacket. The Ellises undoubtedly picked up on a memorable passage in the monograph where Guy Mountfort describes the measuring of the immense crushing force of the bird’s bill at the National Physical Laboratory (with the help of fresh olive stones flown in specially from Palestine). In a later chapter the author observes how a pair of courting hawfinches touched bills for a fraction of a second at which the female sprang away “as though electrified”. Perhaps the jacket captures this rarely witnessed intimate moment in the lives of these elusive birds.’
Two studies of salmon heads, pencil on cartridge paper (35 x 26 cm).
The Salmon was the first of two monographs about fish, the other being The Trout. Eric Hosking had suggested the title, pointing out that it had a large potential market among fly-fishermen (William Collins, himself a keen country sportsman, also published fishing books). Despite its dry text and dim illustrations, the book did well enough to be reprinted several times (and with a small us edition). Consequently The Salmon and The Trout are among the most frequently found New Naturalist monographs on the book market today.
A jacket showing an entire salmon might have looked insipid. c&re decided instead to show just the head and shoulders of an old male fish. Limited to three colours – blue, green and black – they could not show the salmon in its true pink breeding colours nor give much sense of fast-flowing water. What they could do was to suggest the bulk of a large fish with its fins and scales, and above all the characteristic hooked mouth of a mature salmon which was intended to curve over onto the spine. Unfortunately, this was another thin book, and on some copies the fish’s jaws pass right over the spine to end up on the back. The work needed some alterations to the salmon’s eye and head shape, and to cover up some teeth. Trevelyan was ‘pleased to accept’ the revised version in April 1955 – four years before the book was eventually published.
Artwork for The Salmon jacket with printing instructions attached.
Lords & Ladies is the only botanical monograph (unless you count the plant mosaics in Mumps, Measles). Devoted to a single common species, our wild arum lily, the book has become a minor classic, one of the few rounded scientific portraits of any plant. Such was its reputation that the book was later reprinted by BSBI Publications in association with the author’s widow. Unfortunately, disappointing sales precluded more plant monographs, though the book’s schoolmaster author, Cecil T. Prime, was keen to write at least two more, on primroses and thistles. In terms of print-run, Lords & Ladies is the rarest of all the monographs with sales of only about 2,400 over ten years.
The jacket, which was ready by January 1960, was liked by Billy Collins but, for some reason, was ‘not admired’ by the Board. John Gilmour received a mild rebuke for not having checked the artist’s sketch from a botanical viewpoint: ‘It was agreed that all wrapper roughs must be approved by the editor concerned’. The sketch survives, a carefully painted group of lords-and-ladies against a dark background with their glorious purple spadices contrasting well with their pale-green hoods. For the finished jacket the same design is rendered more freely with smudged outlines in two shades of green plus purple (with black for the oval). It is as nice a design as one could wish for and one wonders what the editors found to ‘not admire’ about it.
Modified design of Lords & Ladies with pencil notes.
Full-size sketch for the Lords & Ladies jacket, gouache on watercolour paper with pencilled notes.
Oysters are a difficult title for a book jacket. Unlike, say, scallops or cockles, their shells have no well-defined pattern or form other than being rough and vaguely fan-shaped. Nor do oysters exhibit the kind of behaviour that lends itself to a drawing, still less a three-colour jacket. The only way to be sure that a shell is an oyster is to show someone swallowing one.
The artists stuck to their brief of showing the object of the book close-up and without distracting detail. They simply showed a shell seen from above, and, on the spine, from the side. Whether anyone would recognise the Ellises’ oyster without the title in large white letters above it may be doubted (to me it looks more like a scallop shell). But the colours – olive-green, black and an uncharacteristic bright blue, presumably representing the ocean – are bold and bright, and the smudgy image is certainly eye-catching.
‘Odhams had great difficulty with it,’ noted the current editor, Jean Whitcombe, ‘so I hope you will be pleased with it’ (JW to CE, 25.4.60). But the editors all liked it, and ‘so did Prof. Yonge, the author’ (JW to CE, 2.8.60).
The House Sparrow jacket design before modification, full size, gouache on watercolour paper, and the printed jacket.
Although it was the tenth bird monograph to appear, The House Sparrow is the one that most lives up to the editors’ aim of publishing studies of significant species. In 1963 the sparrow was our most familiar wild bird, especially in towns and cities. Yet, since birders tend to prefer more exotic species in wilder places (as some of the monographs bear out), it had been neglected. Dennis Summers-Smith’s now classic book was the first one ever published about the House Sparrow. Because of its length, a ‘standard biography’ format (i.e. the size of The World of the Honeybee) was briefly considered for the book before opting for the standard monograph format.
C&RE began by sketching House Sparrows from life. They worked up some of these into possible designs, starting with the whole bird, before finally choosing one that showed only the head. This is a sparrow pared down to essentials, in its handsome chestnut, grey and black colours the powerful bill, and open as if in mid-chirrup. The spine shows a second sparrow bathing with fluffed up feathers and a happy look on its face. The design artwork was ready in March 1962, and was well received. Compared with the fuss over some of those printed in the early 1950s one is struck by the smoothness in which these later jackets went through.
Ron Murton used to do a wonderful impersonation of the Wood Pigeon as it pecked and bobbed its way through the clover field. Some of his humour and liveliness survives in The Wood Pigeon, but this is a serious book, and, like The Rabbit, one written by a professional ecologist from an agricultural viewpoint. The science may be impeccable but the distance between the observer and the observed has grown.
The Wood Pigeon is classed as an injurious bird mainly because it likes the same things that we do – such as cabbages, sprouts, turnips and kale. With a nice touch of wit, C&RE chose to show the pigeon along with its recent meal, a stripped-down cabbage leaf. The bird’s coloration allowed them to use a beautiful warm grey-blue, with a bright yellow used in pure form solely for the bird’s eye (the green of the cabbage leaf is yellow on top of blue-grey). It is a quiet design, and the pigeon’s expression is innocence itself.
No correspondence survives for this jacket; presumably, then, production was problem-free.
The Trout took a long time to write: commissioned in 1946, it was not published until 1967. The title was to have been The Brown Trout, but, it seems, the ‘Brown’ bit was dropped after Margaret Brown joined her colleague, Winifred Frost, as coauthor. Perhaps two ‘Browns’ might have been confusing.
The Trout was a better book than The Salmon: more readable, more broad-ranging and better illustrated. And c&re gave it a better jacket. Letting in a lot of white on their favourite turquoise gave an impressionistic sense of rippling water. Three trout move through the current but none is shown full length. They are not individuals but members of a shoal, and they are facing upstream to let the water flow through their gills. The fish are painted very freely in grey with brown overlaps and flecks of black from a dry brush; close-up their shapes almost dissolve. At the authors’ request, the artists straightened the fish’s tail. The revised design was ready by January 1964. c&re hoped that the delicate colours of this jacket would print well. Unfortunately the inks were too opaque to capture the full sense of the trout’s watery world. However, everybody liked it.
Colour sketches for The Trout jacket, gouache on typing paper.
The last of the monographs was about author Kenneth Mellanby’s favourite animal, the mole (he also wrote a children’s book, Talpa the Mole). By 1971 the monographs had more or less run their course; most were out of print or about to become so. Only The Badger, The Herring Gull’s World and the two fish books had been commercial successes, while for some of the others the publishers had actually made a loss. Mellanby was by now a New Naturalist editor, and the mole was a subject which had been on the stocks since the 1940s. The book became another of the successful monographs, thanks to a big Reader’s Union edition (printed in grey boards without the Collins imprint), which remained in print until 1980. Fine copies of the book are relatively easy to find.
For this swan-song monograph, C&RE created one of their most disturbing jackets, a sharp-toothed Dracula of a Mole heaving itself from the earth at night. The design is cleverly done, using brown, pink and dark blue, with black printed on top of other colours to produce a rich, velvety tone for the animal’s fur. It was daring of them to create quite such an unlovely mole. The cue for the jacket may have come from the new editor, Michael Walters (with whom Clifford always seems to have got on well). ‘You’ll know the mole’s interesting system of burrows and castles or underground nesting chambers,’ he wrote teasingly to Clifford, ‘but since it is pitch darkness down there, it will be of little interest to you’ (MW to CE, 15.1.71). The artists’ solution was to show the animal as it leaves its burrow, as if caught in a spotlight.
Colour separations for The Mole jacket for each of the four colours.
With Man & Birds, this was the first jacket to be printed from a set of four colour separations prepared by the artists with black brushwork on thick white paper. Production was problematic. The grey and pink colours were hard to match accurately since they required a lot of white, which increased their opacity. When he saw the first proof, Clifford commented that the pink and grey were too dark and the latter colour also insufficiently warm. This affected the design, notably the modelling of the head and feet, and the tone and colour of the soil which needed to be lighter and warmer than the animal’s fur. Although the jacket was proofed a second time, not all of these problems were overcome.
Colours with pencil notes attached by the artists to colour separations to guide the printer.
After The Mole, titles that might once have been published as New Naturalist monographs, such as British Seals, and the commissioned but never-published The Fox, were listed as mainstream titles. For birds at least, the monographs now faced direct competition from the titles published by T.&A.D. Poyser. Yet there is nothing in the record to suggest a sudden cessation of the series. The monographs seem to have quietly faded away for want of decision and direction.