Carting: two straining horses, carter and part of a hay wagon by Clifford Ellis, 1925. Sketch on rough paper in pencil and sepia wash (27.7 x 41.6 cm).
THE COLLINS NEW NATURALIST LIBRARY is a publishing phenomenon. It started during World War II (like National Parks and nature conservation planning) and rolled on unstoppably, decade after decade, far beyond the plans or expectations.
If you have picked this book up, our guess is that you have at least heard of the series and probably know something about it. Perhaps you came across it at school or university, and have some favourite titles on your shelves. Possibly you are a full-fledged New Naturalist collector. Maybe you even own a full set, now taking up an entire bookcase from floor to ceiling, along with the 22 New Naturalist monographs and the ill-fated single-volume New Naturalist magazine (we know of one or two hardcore collectors who are seeking to own every edition). Or perhaps you are just intrigued about why there should be a whole book about so humble a thing as a book jacket. Either way, do read on.
It would be bad manners, as well as unwarranted, to assume that you know all about the series already and so launch straight into the story of the jackets. The full story of the New Naturalist library, of those that wrote them, and the team that set it all in motion, and kept those titles rolling, can be found in Peter Marren’s The New Naturalists (always apt to be out of print but fairly easily found secondhand, especially in the revised edition). Here we can at least offer a summary of what the books are about, and why they are held in high regard. If this is familiar ground already, skip this bit.
At the time of writing there are 110 titles in the mainstream New Naturalist library. There are also 22 titles in the long out-of-print monograph series devoted to a particular species or more specialised subject. Today’s marketing economies decree that books are never in print for long unless they turn out to be bestsellers; the life in print for a New Naturalist nowadays is only a few years, and often less (it depends on how long the hardback run takes to sell out). But many older New Naturalist titles were kept in print from the date of publication to the 1970s or ‘80s, and some bookshops displayed them all together.
These books are unusual. They are halfway between being popular and academic, and are at once interested in the minutiae of life and the big picture. Taken together they offer a survey of the wildlife and scenery of a single country over half a century that is probably unique. The library was the brainchild of William Collins (1900–1976), managing director of the family publishing business, who conceived an ambition to publish a series on natural history that would establish his company as the leading natural history publisher. The series would take full advantage of the latest developments in colour photography and in the natural sciences. On the publishing side he had established a successful partnership with a printing company, Adprint, with whom he launched the wartime hit series, Britain in Pictures. The partnership was to continue into the early years of the New Naturalists, in which Adprint (until they dropped out in 1950) was to commission illustrations, maps and diagrams.
Collins decided he needed a team of distinguished naturalists to draw up a list of titles, find the right authors for them, and to ensure the highest scientific and literary standards. This became the New Naturalist Board (also called the New Naturalist Committee). Collins persuaded Julian Huxley, one of Britain’s leading zoologists, to head the team, along with James Fisher, a young ornithologist whose book, Watching Birds, had been a wartime bestseller. The pair was joined by the bird photographer Eric Hosking, the botanist John Gilmour, and the geographer, Dudley Stamp, with either Collins himself or, increasingly, a deputy, officiating. The Board had its first meeting in early 1943, and thereafter met more or less monthly in a succession of temporary premises in war-torn London. Each of the editors was responsible for the titles within their professional knowledge, and they took a small royalty from the books for their services. They were loyal to the series and its aims, and, one suspects, shared a sense of mission born of the war and the hopes of the new Britain that would follow it. The original Board oversaw the developing series for 23 years without change until the death of Dudley Stamp in 1966. The last of them, Eric Hosking, served the series for nearly half a century.
The credo of the series was spelt out opposite to the title page of every book. Its aim was ‘to interest the general reader in the wildlife of Britain by recapturing the enquiring spirit of the old naturalists’. This reads a little oddly now – who exactly were these ‘old naturalists’? The style sounds like James Fisher’s and he was probably thinking primarily of people like Gilbert White, the parson of Selborne, whose approach to nature was based on asking himself intelligent questions and trying to find out the answer by observation and simple experiment: ‘the enquiring spirit’. In the view of some, ‘nature study’ had since degenerated into trophy hunting and collecting: pinning, stuffing, pressing and mounting. Fisher wanted to reignite the old spark. The New Naturalists, that is, the modern successors of Gilbert White, would be best served by a correspondingly new kind of book, dedicated to ‘maintaining a high standard of accuracy combined with clarity of exposition in presenting the results of modern scientific research’. Above all, they would be about live animals, not dead ones.
It all sounds rather formidable and challenging. Natural history was to be revitalised by the latest developments in genetics, behaviour and, above all, ecology and conservation, simplified as far as possible for a lay public, but never oversimplified. In practice it meant that many titles were written, with varying degrees of literary skill, by university professors and other academics; some even became set books for the Open University and other educational institutions in the 1960s and ‘70s, and were published in paperback to match student budgets. Did the books succeed in their lofty aims? Some did. A few were too dry or overspecialised, and quite often the academic authors strained too hard to be impersonal even when describing their own, sometimes mould-breaking, research. At their best, though, with The Sea Shore, say, or The Wild Orchids of Britain, there is a happy and constructive meeting of new science and old natural history. And some of the best books in the series were written by ‘amateur naturalists’, like W. S. Bristowe’s The World of Spiders, or, among the monographs, Ernest Neal’s The Badger.
The New Naturalist ‘credo’ promised that wild animals, birds and plants would be ‘portrayed in the full beauty of their natural colours, by the latest methods of colour photography and reproduction’ (this promise was quietly dropped once the colour content dropped to almost zero!). The phrasing sounds old-fashioned now, but in 1945 colour film was scarce, and so slow that it could only capture wildlife if it remained obligingly motionless. For the colour plates of Butterflies, published in 1945, live butterflies were said to have been photographed for the first time in colour against a realistic (but not necessarily natural) background.
The first New Naturalist titles were Butterflies by E. B. Ford and London’s Natural History by R. S. R. Fitter. This was to be a numbered series, and, since things never go exactly to plan, these were numbers 1 and 3. There was never any particular order to the titles. The reason why New Naturalist number 1 happened to be Butterflies was that it was the first book to be completed. London’s Natural History was not even on the original wish list. Its author, Richard Fitter, had been asked to write about the Thames Valley but said he preferred to do a book on London. There was, in fact, a fair amount of randomness to the whole process. Many planned books about the forthcoming National Parks or about bird habitats, or even major topics like fish or ferns, were never completed (or not until decades later). Sometimes the Board responded positively to a suggestion, for example for a title about bumblebees or the folklore of birds, especially in the early days when it seemed that the public was ready for almost any subject so long as it was attractively presented.
In the immediate postwar years the New Naturalists sold like hot cakes. Most of the first titles had initial print-runs of 20,000 or even 30,000, and so are still common (though in variable condition) in secondhand shops or on the internet. From about 1950, the sales slackened, partly because of the rising costs of printing, especially colour printing, and also, probably, because the series had lost its initial lustre and punch. The average print-run of titles published in the 1950s was only half that of the ‘40s, while the total sales of most of the new titles published after 1960 were in only four figures (and remain so today).
What, then, made this the longest-running and most highly regarded natural history series of them all? A good start was important, permeated by that messianic wartime vision of the future. The books had things to offer that were new and exciting: colour photography, new ways of seeing wildlife, most notably in the context of their homes and habitats, glimpses of the vast worlds of ecology and evolution behind the lives of familiar animals and plants. The books themselves were attractive and produced with care with hard-wearing buckram bindings, gold-blocking of the title and colophon, and the good printing and layout for which Collins was famous. Being numbered and in standard livery, they were collectible, and became more and more so as the titles accumulated. They were reasonably priced, at 16 shillings in 1945. They sat nicely in the hand and handled well, neither springing shut nor falling flat. They even (or is this just us?) smelled nice, of hayfields in late summer. And then there were the jackets …
The jackets. We come to it at last. The first New Naturalist jackets were bold, imaginative and quirky, quite outside the usual run of natural history book design. They lacked detail or line and yet there was something about them that struck the eye and invited the curious to take down the book and open it. If there was anything remotely like them in the bookshop, it certainly wasn’t on the natural history shelves. On each of the early titles, the letters ‘C&RE ‘appear, followed by the date. Who or what, some must have wondered, was C&RE? Let’s begin with that.
The letters C&RE on the New Naturalist book jackets stand for Clifford and Rosemary Ellis; their names are usually spelt out in full on the rear fly leaf. Today these jackets are their best-known work, though book lovers may know some of their other jackets before and after the war, for the Collins Countryside series in the 1970s, or their design for John Betjeman’s Collins Guide to English Parish Churches. Within the art world they are remembered more as innovative teachers, Clifford Ellis having run the Academy of Art at Corsham Court for a quarter of a century with his wife Rosemary as a leading member of the staff. But information about them is quite hard to come by. There is no biography, and very little about them on the internet. I attempted a short biography of ‘C&RE’ (as I shall call them) and their work for my book, The New Naturalists (1995), with the help and cooperation of Rosemary and her two daughters, Penelope and Charlotte. This more detailed account builds on that foundation, and, once again, I have relied heavily on information and comments from the family.
Clifford and Rosemary Ellis were at once husband and wife and an artistic partnership. Their collaboration began in 1931, the year of their marriage, and subsequently almost all their published freelance work is signed jointly. By the time the New Naturalist jackets were designed they had taken to using the cipher c&re to express their joint authorship. Such consistent use of a joint cipher is unusual, and needs a little explanation. The initials were put in alphabetical order, not out of any sense of seniority. In the 1930s and ‘40s, ‘r’ sometimes preceded ‘c’ to indicate where she was the initiator and had carried out most of the work. Penelope Ellis explained that its point was that they considered their freelance design work to be the product of two minds ‘collaborating in flexible harmony’. They seemingly never discussed with a third party who did what, and their work on book jackets was usually done behind closed doors. Both were distinctive artists and respected each other’s styles and preferences. The handwriting on the surviving New Naturalist artwork jackets is invariably Clifford’s (as is most but not all of the correspondence), but it would be wrong to assume that the hand that held the brush was normally his. The final artwork was only the last stage in a lengthy process of sketching and thinking, selecting and eliminating, and the creative impulse behind the design was, as they saw it, an equal joint effort. ‘c&re’ indicates a rare and complete fusion of creative thought.
Carting: two straining horses, carter and part of a hay wagon by Clifford Ellis, 1925. Sketch on rough paper in pencil and sepia wash (27.7 x 41.6 cm).
Clifford Wilson Ellis was born in Bognor, Sussex on 1 March 1907, the eldest of four children born to John and Annie Ellis. Artistic talent ran in the Ellis family. His father was a commercial artist, while his paternal grandfather, William Blackman Ellis, was not only a painter and naturalist but, for a time, a skilled commercial taxidermist. ‘Grandfather Ellis’ was also a countryman in the old-fashioned sense with a deep understanding of the land and its wildlife (in Clifford’s boyhood he kept a tame otter which was allowed to roam over part of his house in Arundel).
Another well-known artist in the family was Clifford’s ‘Uncle Ralph’, Ralph Gordon Ellis (1885–1963), a landscape painter and designer of inn signs. During his long career he designed hundreds of signs, especially for the Chichester-based Henty & Constable brewery. One of them, for ‘The Mayflower’ in Portsmouth, was the subject of a postage stamp in 2003. A blue plaque now marks his former home on Maltravers Street, Arundel. Around 1950, Clifford took his younger daughter, Charlotte, to Uncle Ralph’s studio, and she remembers him explaining to them both how inn signs are designed to make an impact from a distance, well above eye level, and how that was a very different matter from being seen close to, on the easel. Clifford, in turn, was to become fascinated by the way subjects are transformed when seen at different angles or against different backgrounds.
In 1916, his father having joined the Royal Engineers and been sent to France on active service, the nine-year-old Clifford spent several formative months with his grandparents at Arundel while his mother, expecting another baby, coped with her two small children at her parents’ home in Highbury. On vividly recalled walks with Grandfather Ellis, Clifford discovered nature and wildlife in the unspoiled West Sussex countryside, including the magnificent great park of Arundel Castle with its herds of deer – an experience, enhanced on subsequent holidays, that made a profound and lasting impression on him. From Grandfather Ellis he learned how to preserve and stuff animals, as well as to arrange their pose and painted backdrop to make them look as lifelike as possible. There are family memories of the young Clifford boiling small mammals to reveal their skeletons, and, once, his causing consternation by fainting halfway through the dissection of a rabbit. Clifford also acquired an assortment of slightly unorthodox pets: lizards, frogs and stick insects.
In November 1916, following the birth of his sister, Clifford rejoined his mother and family in Highbury to sit the Junior County Scholarship which enabled him to attend the Dame Alice Owens Boys’ School in Finsbury. He was by now what his later colleague and fellow teacher Colin Thompson described as ‘a voracious reader’, a habit he kept up all his life. He became a frequent visitor to London Zoo which he used as a kind of living reference library to study the way the animals moved and behaved. Throughout his life he enjoyed visiting zoos, exhibitions, galleries and museums, both at home and abroad, filing away perceptions and images in his mind. ‘Clifford was deeply interested in visual communication,’ recalled Charlotte. ‘His visual memory was extensive and nearly always deadly accurate.’ The jacket of British Seals, for example, was based on his memories of the postures of seals at London Zoo.
Clifford and Rosemary Ellis (1937), in their studio with the cartoon for the mosaic floor for the British Pavilion, Paris Exhibition of 1937. Photo: Kate Collinson/Norman Parkinson Studio (Kate Collinson was Rosemary Ellis’s sister).
After leaving school, Clifford attended two full-time courses in London art schools, first St Martin’s College of Art, then the Regent Street Polytechnic, before taking University of London postgraduate diploma courses in art history and art education – where he was particularly inspired by the innovative ideas of Marion Richardson. All this time his perceptions of art were expanding. From his family he had thoroughly absorbed the William Morris-derived notion of ‘art for all’ – the infusion of artistic principles in the arts and crafts, as expressed in commercial art such as posters and advertisements. As far as he was concerned, natural history, art, educational theory and graphic design were interlinked aspects of a whole. Visits to exhibitions by progressive artists like Paul Cézanne, or the opportunity of seeing Paul Klee paintings brought to lectures by Roger Fry, opened his eyes to their freshness of colour and the visual impact of forms reduced to their essentials.
Leaves from Rosemary Ellis’s scrapbook of c. 1944–5, made up of fragments of designs, collage and printed, in watercolour, pen and printing ink, double spread (23 x 37 cm).
Having been a student teacher at the Regent Street Polytechnic, in 1928 Clifford became a full-time member of staff there. He was placed in charge of the first-year students and taught perspective – a technique and skill he mastered with ease and whose historical development always fascinated him. One of his young students there was his future wife, Rosemary Collinson. Born in Totteridge, North London in 1910, Rosemary, like Clifford, came from a family of craftsmen and artists. Her grandfather was F.W. Collinson, a leading designer of art furniture and co-founder of the fashionably aesthetic firm of Collinson & Lock. Her father, Frank Graham Collinson, trained as an artist and cabinet maker before going into the family firm and subsequently founding his own furniture business, Frank Collinson & Co, Designs for Decorations & Furniture.
Rosemary was also related to a famous writer, her maternal uncle, Edward Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) – ‘Uncle Jack’ as Rosemary knew him – the leader writer and author of innovative modern detective novels, notably Trent’s Last Case, who, while still at school, had invented the ‘clerihew’, the humorous rhyming form of verse named after him. His subsequent published volumes of clerihews had great popular success and many eminent emulators.
Rosemary’s father had joined the Volunteers where he rose to become colonel, a rank he retained on their later absorption into the Territorial Army. He served in the Great War at that rank, initially in training but soon enough on service, first in France and then in Italy. There, having survived the war, he succumbed to the terrible worldwide flu epidemic in 1919. Rosemary, with her sisters and brothers, had been taken by their mother to live with her parents in their large house at Netley Marsh in the New Forest. Rosemary therefore had a similar, if lengthier, formative experience to Clifford’s, of a wartime country childhood. She, too, developed a deep fascination for nature and animals in and around the Forest, and always retained particularly fond and vivid memories of her grandfather’s pigs and rare-breed herd of Gloucester park cattle. After the war Rosemary and her younger sister moved with their widowed mother to London; their elder siblings had, by then, flown the nest.
Clifford and Rosemary married in 1931. Rosemary brought to the artistic partnership an instinctive eye for colour, tone and composition; she had a quick mind and the ability to master a new medium at speed. They shared the same open, enquiring spirit, branching out at various times into sculpture, mosaic (including an important commission for the design and laying of the mosaic floor for the British pavilion at the Paris Exhibition in 1937), ceramics and modelling, needlework and mural painting. But their distinctive sense of colour and design is nowhere better seen than in the posters they designed in the 1930s. Posters in the 1920s and ‘30s were often designed with great care and dash, even those that were advertising a product. They became an art form pursued by progressive artists on both sides of the Atlantic in which an image was used to convey a powerful message. Successful poster art needed to say something clearly, simply and, above all, memorably. Distilling a sometimes complex idea into a single image exercised the brain quite as much as a large canvas or sculpture. In their day many leading artists designed posters in the prevailing spirit of ‘art for all’, as a means of bringing art centre-stage into the lives of ordinary people. Among the rising generation of British artists designing posters and book jackets at this time were Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Barnett Freedman, Paul Nash and the American graphic designer, Edward McKnight Kauffer – more or less a Who’s Who of contemporary British art. The 1930s were, arguably, the high noon of poster art in Britain. Every image, said the artist John Berger, ‘embodies a way of seeing’ (Bernstein, 1992). The artist’s job was to see something as if for the first time, and to communicate that insight.
Clifford and Rosemary designed many posters during the 1930s, for the Empire Marketing Board, for Shell-Mex and BP Ltd, for the great Frank Pick, inspirational Chief Executive of the London Passenger Transport Board, and for the Post Office, as well as lithographs for Lyon’s Corner House (‘the Teashop Lithographs’), all of them institutions that found reasons for persuading top artists to produce work for what one called ‘the art gallery of the street’. Paul Rennie described the Ellis’s poster style as ‘painterly’, effectively building up their designs as a succession of separate colour printings. ‘These combined the expressive style of the early design reformers with a Fauvist-inspired colour palette’ (Rennie, 2008).
BP Poster by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, 1932, printed lithographically by Vincent Brooks, Day & Sons Ltd (75.6 x 114 cm).
Some of their posters were intended for specific events, such as test matches, while others were part of a public service for educational and cultural establishments such as museums, galleries and gardens. One of their first major commissions, from 1932, advertised Whipsnade Zoo above a banner suggesting that BP Petrol was the ideal medium for your car journey to the zoo. Designed to catch the eye of a passer-by (the original poster measured 45 by 30 inches), it is an unforgettable image of four wolves staring wide-eyed from the trees with not a cage or bar in sight. Like so much of their work, this image was based on close on-the-spot observation. Rosemary’s memory was of the young Clifford and herself walking to Whipsnade over the downs by night, and choosing a dry ditch to take a nap, waking to find the wolves staring at them.
Another important sponsor of commercial art was Shell, which later showcased some of the best poster design from the 1920s and ‘30s in The Shell Poster Book (1992). The man responsible, a counterpart to Frank Pick at London Transport, was Jack Beddington, who persuaded the company to allow artists to produce designs in their own way with a minimum of commercial interference. Together, the Shell collection advertises not so much the corporate brand as the British landscape and way of life, while, seemingly incidentally, presenting Shell in the guise of a patron of artistic good taste. One of c&re’s Shell designs, dated 1934, shows Lower Slaughter Mill in Gloucestershire as an image of a lost rural England of millstreams, sleepy willows and a village lane empty of cars, painted in pure greens, ochres and reds. It is signed ‘Rosemary and Clifford Ellis’, and hence was a Rosemary-initiated design. Another poster, a joint work done the same year, has an array of antique artefacts, including a grinning stone gargoyle, within a ruined abbey and assures us with a wink that ‘Antiquaries Prefer Shell’.
London Transport bill, Winter Visitors, by c&re, 1937, printed by Dangerfield Printing Company Ltd, London (25.5 x 73 cm).
London Transport window bill by c&re advertising Test Match at The Oval, 1939, printed by Sir Joseph Causton & Sons Ltd, London (25.5 x 31.5 cm).
London Transport window bill, Come out to live! by c&re, 1936 (25.5 x 31.5 cm).
It is quite easy to spot a poster by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis even without the cipher. The colours are fresh, bright and without outlines, the designs simple and bold, and the foregrounds and backgrounds juxtaposed in a characteristic way. They often express an idea rather than a product. With hindsight one might discern elements of the New Naturalist jackets in their poster of a trout fisher’s tackle over the legend ‘Anglers prefer Shell’. Their taste for open-air scenes of nature is still more evident in a quartet of metre-tall images commissioned by London Transport, entitled simply, ‘Wood’, ‘Heath’, ‘Down’ and ‘River’, each symbolised by a lively graphic representation of a wild bird, respectively a green woodpecker, an owl, a kestrel and a heron. In the background of each one, people are having fun: ramblers ask a shepherd for directions; a man and his girl choose a spot for their picnic; a dad gives his child a piggy-back ride. Nature is accessible and enhances life.
From 1934 to 1937, the couple also designed dust jackets for novels published by Jonathan Cape, having caught the eye of a young editor, Ruth Atkinson. These were printed in a similar way to a poster, by lithography and in three colours, and they were executed in a modernist style that brings together intriguing elements from the story. Clifford and Rosemary always liked to read the book before they started work on the jacket. I have never heard of North-West by North by Dora Birtles, or The White Farm by Geraint Goodwin, let alone read them, but their striking jackets would certainly make me want to take up the book and open it.
By 1936, the couple, with their year-old first child, Penelope, had moved to Bath where they had both been offered teaching posts. Rosemary became the art teacher at the Royal School for Daughters of officers of the Army on Lansdown, while Clifford took up an appointment as assistant master at the Bath School of Art, then part of the city’s Technical College. Initially he taught art to 12- to 14-year-olds preparing for local trades skills, such as bookbinding, painting and decorating. He must have made a great impression because, two years later, he was appointed headmaster.
London Transport window bill, Summer Is Flying, by c&re, 1938, printed by Johnson, Riddle & Co, London (25.5 x 73 cm).
Meanwhile, shortly after their arrival in Bath, Clifford and Rosemary joined the Bath Society of Artists, where they were soon elected onto the committee for the Society’s annual exhibitions. Among the many artists they came to know was the painter, and sometime pupil of Sickert, Paul Ayshford, Lord Methuen (1886–1974), as well as the famous ‘grand old man of British painting’ himself, Walter Sickert. The now aged and venerable Sickert, with his third wife, the painter Therese Lessore, had moved to Bathampton in 1938, where they lived in what was to prove their last home at St George’s Hill. Ailing but still active and ever quizzical, Sickert proposed to Clifford in March 1939 that he teach at the Art School once a week, free of charge. His offer was eagerly accepted, and Sickert would talk and reminisce for two hours every Friday to Clifford’s students, continuing to do so until his health failed him in the early years of the war. Clifford and Rosemary were to be of great help to Therese Lessore in the hard task of caring for Sickert during his final illness up to his death in January 1942.
In 1939 Modelling for Amateurs by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis was published in the Studio ‘How to do It’ series (a revised edition was published, again in two formats in 1945). By then, the Ellises were at the heart of the local art world, teaching, and producing innovative freelance work. Then World War II intervened.
The art school remained operational throughout the war, even after being transferred to and then bombed out of its wartime Green Park buildings during the ‘Baedeker’ air raids on Bath. Remarkably, under the circumstances, a fine if less spacious house was made available in Sydney Place. Clifford saw the war in a positive light as an opportunity for sharing ‘a deeper and richer life’ through the dispensation of the arts. When war was declared, Clifford was 32 and unlikely to be called up. But he certainly did his bit. He joined the local Home Guard (and said long afterwards that Dad’s Army got it spot on). He also worked as a camouflage officer and instructor, working out how to make factories look like ordinary rows of terraced houses when seen from the air. Moreover he was invited to contribute to the ‘Recording Britain’ programme instigated by Kenneth Clark. The programme gave official work at home to many artists not commissioned into the services under the auspices of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts). In this context, Clifford made a pictorial record of Bath’s bomb-damaged buildings of architectural importance, as well as of the city’s beautiful iron railings and gates before they were removed, supposedly for turning into tanks and planes. Clifford succeeded in saving some of the best examples, but most of the Georgian, Regency and Victorian railings removed in Bath, having (like those removed from London and other cities) proved useless for military purposes, were later dumped in the North Sea. In addition to running the Art School and his continued active involvement in the Bath Society of Artists, Clifford also founded the Bath Art Club in 1940 where, throughout the war on Monday evenings, he sustained a remarkably wide-ranging and inspired programme of notable guest lecturers, including Kenneth Clark, John Summerson, Nikolaus Pevsner, John Piper, Geoffrey Grigson and Lawrence Binyon.
Rosemary, meanwhile, was pursuing her teaching at the Royal School. However, since its buildings, like so many in Bath, had been requisitioned by the Admiralty for the duration of the war, the School had been evacuated to Longleat House, near Frome. This meant that Rosemary underwent a lengthy daily round trip by bus and bike (she hid her bicycle behind a telephone kiosk near the bus stop). She nonetheless found time to make some delightful pen-and-wash studies of the girls’ incongruous occupation of the magnificent Longleat interiors, and of buildings in and around Bath. And, by the end of the war, she and Clifford had their second daughter, Charlotte, born in 1945.
The art school premises at Sydney Place were cramped, and Clifford worried that, as people returned from the war, they might very well be taken over for housing. It occurred to him that were the Bath School of Art to become a residential art college it did not need to be in the middle of the city, and that a suitable rural location would in many ways be preferable. And, as it happened, Lord Methuen’s country seat at Corsham Court, a fine Elizabethan mansion, altered and enlarged in the eighteenth century, was about to be returned to its owner after being used by the War Department as a convalescent home for injured troops.
Book jacket designed by C&SE and printed in four colours by Collins, published in 1958. John Betjeman liked it.
Jackets designed for Jonathan Cape by C&SE, printed in three colours.
London Transport window bill advertising London Zoo by C&SE, 1939, printed by Dangerfield Printing Co Ltd, London (25.5 x 31.5 cm).
‘It was one of those flukes which doesn’t occur very often,’ recalled Clifford. ‘It was a matter of finding somewhere … with a bit more space than we had got then at Sydney Place … I made a mental note of likely places and Corsham Court was top of the list. I telephoned Lord Methuen and asked him what he was going to do when he got rid of the convalescent hospital and he said he wished he knew, so we arranged to meet the next day, and in those few hours of optimism when the war ended, the whole thing was fixed up in something like a week. It couldn’t have been done earlier and it couldn’t have been done later. So we offered ourselves as a place for students to come the following September, and they came, and we started.’ (from a taped interview with C?, 1981).
To run what became the Bath Academy of Art, Clifford had turned down a proffered Chair of Fine Art at Durham University. In the words of the Prospectus of 1953–4, he ‘hoped that the existing school might contribute “depth” and the new school “breadth”, to an Academy which as a whole might be greater than its parts’. The four-year course, leading to the Ministry’s National Diploma in Design, was based on an unusually liberal and broad-based scheme of teaching, which would include not only the visual arts but music, dancing and drama, as well as various branches of science and technology. In response to the vast national demand for teachers (secondary education having been guaranteed for all under the 1944 Butler Education Act), he was also able to provide a training course for art teachers; by the time the course closed in 1967, some 600 art teachers had passed through the college.
The Academy opened as a residential college in September 1946 with Clifford as its Principal and Rosemary as an active member of staff (her role changed from ‘art education’ in the 1950s to ‘senior year tutor’, ‘senior lecturer’ and ‘chairman of the board of studies’ in the 1960s, specialising in audio-visual studies and visual communication). The Ellises moved into a flat in part of the top floor of the east wing.
Lithograph (with added watercolour) of a pike and arrowhead lilies signed by Clifford Ellis, shown at West Riding Spring in 1973 (77 x 56.5 cm).
Clifford ran the Bath Academy of Art at Corsham for a quarter of a century, from 1946 until his retirement in 1972, aged 65. He did so with enthusiasm and vigour, and with a syllabus strongly flavoured with Clifford’s inner conviction that ‘arts are the staple of the fulfilled life’. One teacher had been warned before arriving that Clifford ‘had a lot of funny ideas. Corsham was trying to teach too many things all at once … the students were only dabbling in drawing and painting and sculpture’ (Pope). To this, Clifford might have replied that his idea of teaching art was to practise it. He wished to draw from his students the same sense of vocation that he felt himself, ‘like a gardener tending his plants’. He was ahead of his time in believing in teaching by suggestion, by opening windows and encouraging the student to develop their own burgeoning talent.
To further this aim, Clifford resolved to restrict the number of students to a maximum of 250 or so. He also assembled an impressive number of full- and part-time teachers who were, like himself, practising artists, some of whom were, or later became, famous. The distinguished painter William Scott (1913–1989) was the part-time senior painting master, while Kenneth Armitage (1916–2002), who notably made his name with his bronze figures, was in charge of sculpture. The painter-potter James Tower (1919–1988) taught all aspects of pottery and ceramic art, and took students on archaeological digs. A taste of cosmopolitan Europe was brought by the Warsaw-born painter Peter Potworowski (1898–1962). Howard Hodgkin (b. 1932), first a student, taught part-time for eleven years before concentrating full-time on his own painting. At different times, amongst other staff were influential artists like Peter Lanyon (1918–1964), Adrian Heath (1920–1992) and Gillian Ayres (b. 1930). Among such a stellar gathering, the sense one gets from the recollections of Corsham teachers and students is of a bucolic idyll in the Wiltshire countryside among a group of like-minded masters and apprentices.
The surroundings lent themselves to nature study, which was always close to Clifford’s heart. The Court was set in grounds that recalled his beloved boyhood Arundel Park. The academic syllabus included, in the early years at least, botany, biology and geology, and natural forms always remained a key component of pre-diploma and design courses. In keeping with these precepts, Clifford created various gardens at nearby Beechfield, which had also been acquired for the Academy. His ‘bog garden’ lent itself to the first-hand study of various botanical ‘forms’, and there were also aviaries where the students could observe and sketch small birds, pheasants, ducks and geese.
Although they could both put a name to most of the birds and wild flowers they saw, Clifford and Rosemary were more interested in the shapes and designs of nature, with their energy, strength and boundless variety, and the way they feed the artist’s imagination. ‘The artist,’ said Clifford, ‘must develop an acute sympathy for the forms of nature. He is himself part of nature. He is a living organism and its rhythms are his rhythms. Though, as an artist, he will work “parallel to, and not after nature”, he must still refresh himself, and constantly, by a sensitive observation of its forms’ (Ellis, 1945).
Clifford and Rosemary’s book, Modelling for Amateurs, includes not only lively renditions of nature but natural objects themselves: ‘Notice the full roundness of the fox’s skull, and then the sudden ridge that runs down it: or the tough but delicate curve of the deer’s jaw…,’ they wrote. ‘Compare the three shells on the left – see what they have in common and yet how freshly and surprisingly different is each of the individual spirals. Then turn the book sideways and upside down and look at them again. There will be surprises. Then instead of looking at the shells look at the shapes of the background.’
Clifford was remembered at Corsham as a visionary, a man with the confidence to tread his own path and flavour the syllabus with his own artistic credo. Never part of the art establishment, he was seen as a crank in some quarters and never received the national honour many thought he deserved (Brown, 1988). In thanking Clifford and Rosemary for making ‘a seemingly redundant Mansion into a virile Academy of Art’, Lord Methuen felt they had ‘welded Bath to the structure [ie. the house] for another hundred years’ and proved that ‘these historic houses have a future, when used for the benefit of those who come under their influence and who are receptive to their principles of life’ (private letter, 19.7.1972). Alas, long after the Ellises’ departure, changing times finally caught up with the Bath Academy of Art. In 1983, it was amalgamated with the Bath College of Higher Education, and, three years later, lost the unique ambience of Corsham Court. It is now called the Bath School of Art and Design within Bath Spa University. Beechfield, where the students learned to paint and turn their pots, is now a ‘gracious’ housing development, with the house and former stable block converted into flats.
Clifford and Rosemary had bought a house in a Wiltshire village just below the downs where the family moved in 1972. One sunny room was allocated as a studio, and another became home to Clifford’s large and wide-ranging book collection. Below the house, Clifford planted a new valley garden with an artist’s eye. He continued to teach, part-time, on adult education courses, and he and Rosemary collaborated with others on the texts of educational books for children. Rosemary pursued her photographic interests and, with her elder daughter, Penelope, produced numerous sets of large prints illustrating aspects of the natural and man-made world. They also, of course, continued to design the New Naturalist book jackets as well as some of those of the Collins Countryside series. Both their daughters qualified, Penelope as a sculptor at the Slade and subsequently as a teacher at the Institute of Education at London University, and Charlotte as an architect at the Regent Street Polytechnic.
Book jacket designed by c&re, 1945 and published by Collins. The author, Stuart Smith went on to write The Yellow Wagtail in the NN monographs.
Clifford died, after a short illness, 19 March 1985, aged 78. Rosemary and Penelope continued to live in the same house until Rosemary’s death, aged 87, on Ascension Day, 21 May 1998. They are buried in the same grave on a grassy plot in the village cemetery below the downs under a headstone (carved by Penelope with some advice from Charlotte), inscribed simply ‘C&RE ‘with their respective dates.
The House of Collins was not, until the New Naturalist library appeared, noted for imaginative jackets for their non-fiction titles. For the great wartime series, Britain in Pictures, the jacket had simply repeated the pattern stamped on the boards; it did little more than provide the title of the book and a common branding. The lowly role of such ‘wrappers’ is summed up in a piece of doggerel the New Naturalist collector Roger Long once found inscribed on the wrapper of a book of verse:
This outer wrap is only meant
To keep my coat from detriment.
Please take it off, and let me show
The better one I wear below.
The New Naturalists were different. The war was still on when Clifford and Rosemary designed their first New Naturalist jackets, Butterflies and London’s Natural History, in autumn 1944. The first dozen or so were done at home at Lansdown Road, Bath, and the later ones, until 1972, at Corsham Court or while on family holidays, often abroad. The jackets were all based on first-hand research, and, as often as not, involved journeys to look for suitable material for a jacket. For example, they made a special trip to Dartmoor, and, later on, visited both Orkney and (Clifford alone) Shetland for their respective jackets. Sometimes material was found much closer to home, such as for Lords and Ladies and the bee orchid for the discarded jacket of Wild Orchids which were found growing by the north walk at Corsham Court. For The Pollination of Flowers, Clifford visited the Hatherley Laboratories at Exeter University to see Michael Proctor and hear about his work on pollination photography. Each jacket was the result of research, sketches, colour experiments, and much thought before arriving at a suitably arresting image.
The basic form of the New Naturalist jacket was worked out on the very first jacket, Butterflies, and continues, barely changed, 65 years later. Its distinctive style has no obvious link to other book jackets published at the time by Collins, and it seems likely, though nothing we have seen explicitly says so, that every element on it – the coloured band with the title in nearly all cases spelt out in white, the oval on the spine containing the New Naturalist ‘colophon’, and the wrap-around, lithographic image itself – was thought out by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis. They also designed the distinctive New Naturalist symbol of two conjoined letters N, together with the charming idea of a small symbolic image where the letters meet. Similarly, they designed the special monograph colophon of ‘NMN’, which was worked out with pencil on the commissioning letter from Collins. The idea of a numbered series was, however, probably taken from the long-running Britain in Pictures series published by Collins and Adprint between 1941 and 1945. It was implicit from the start that this would be another numbered ‘library’ of books.
Art jackets were not new in 1944; Clifford and Rosemary had themselves designed jackets for Jonathan Cape. The first book jackets that aimed to be more than pictorial paper bags had appeared in the early 20th century, and by the 1930s a new generation of artists like Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious had begun to specialise in the medium, producing jackets that look vivid and fresh even today. Adventurous jackets were not confined to works of fiction. For the English Life series published by Batsford, Brian Cook produced dazzling wrap-around designs that exploited a new process for overlaying coloured transparent inks of high intensity that were, in his words, ‘blatant, bizarre, strident and unreal’ (Cook, 1987). Encouraged by craftsman-printers like Thomas Griffits, lithography became a popular printing method to produce jackets of brilliant colour and bold graphic form. World War II and rationing brought most of this to a screeching halt, and the bookshops of the immediate postwar world were a good deal dingier than before. Fortunately the firm of Collins was a printer as well as a publisher, and had stocks in hand to make a splash with the new series.
While the public were used to seeing art jackets around books, they might have been surprised to see them on books about butterflies and geology. It would be an exaggeration to say that the New Naturalist jackets created a sensation, but they certainly impressed the booksellers and William Collins was much encouraged by the positive trade response to the first two Ellis jackets. The colours were bright but not garish, reminiscent of lithographic prints, and produced using matt inks on rough-surfaced paper. They strongly implied something new and in which Collins took great pride. It was unusual, even then, for jackets to be completely hand-drawn, right down to the series colophon and title lettering. They caught the eye, as intended, but the books also sat sweetly together on the shelf, more and more so as the series expanded. Perhaps few jackets had paid such close attention to the spine and the way it fitted into the rest of the design. They might have been more stunning still if the artists had been allowed to carry on the design over to the back of the book, as Brian Cook did on the Batsford books, but that space was needed to advertise, and later to list other titles in the series.
To summarise the New Naturalist jacket:
It portrayed the contents of the book in bold forms and bright colours, printed by craft methods. The arts-and-craft look was intensified by the exquisite hand-lettering of the early titles.
The design was ‘bled off’, that is, there was no frame or margin. It ran over the edge in every direction except one, where the design petered over on to the back, ending not in a mechanical line but in brushstrokes.
The jackets were, at least initially, prepared for printing by skilled lithographers used to interpreting the ideas of an artist.
The book was easy and pleasant to handle because the design was printed on slightly rough paper and did not slip. For the same reason it fitted snugly to the buckram binding of the book.
The jackets showed ‘forms of nature’ interpreted by sympathetic and knowledgeable artists that gave them vitality and inner life. They were intended to intrigue. They were not intended to shock, but perhaps, especially at first, they did.
My book, The New Naturalists, describes in some detail how William Collins conceived this ground-breaking series of nature books, and the board of celebrity scientists which he set up to commission books and oversee their production. The committee was headed by Julian Huxley, perhaps then Britain’s best-known biologist, but the key personality on it was his energetic protégé, James Fisher. The young Fisher was full of fire about the advance of natural history in postwar Britain; he was in great demand for natural history radio programmes in the 1940s and ‘50s. He, perhaps more than the others, was convinced of the potential mass appeal of illustrated books on natural history and their importance in promoting interest in birds and other wildlife. He was later to become a great influence on natural history publishing, not least as a senior advisor and book commissioner for Collins.
The idea of fancy jackets for the New Naturalist books appears to have originated in the mind of Ruth Atkinson, who joined the firm in 1943 and soon became a trusted advisor to the chairman, William (‘Billy’) Collins. During the 1930s she had worked as a book editor for Jonathan Cape where, among other things, she commissioned artists to design jackets. Clifford and Rosemary Ellis had been among her clients; she had been impressed by their work and, it seems, had already got to know them well. On 20 July 1944, Ruth wrote to the Ellises to tell them about the forthcoming series and ask whether they now felt ‘at all inclined to do book jackets’. The new books would have ‘a great many illustrations’, she went on, ‘and I thought that you would do lovely jackets for them.’ But, she warned, ‘there are a great many people whom the jacket must please: besides Mr Collins, the editorial committee of this series and the producers of it, Messrs Adprint.’ She invited them to ‘work out a rough, for say the first title’, and hoped to be able to discuss it further with them (RA to C&RE, 20.7.44).
The Ellises’ response was to invite her to Bath for the weekend where, during a ‘deliciously comfortable and peaceful stay’, Ruth persuaded C&RE to try out a colour sketch for the jacket of Butterflies by E.B. Ford. As was to become the rule, she sent them some material and ‘pulls’ of plates from the book to provide an idea of its nature and contents. By September 1944, the artists had produced an arresting design based on the Swallowtail butterfly and its caterpillar, drawn at twice the size of the printed jacket. At the same time they had also, presumably at Ruth Atkinson’s request, produced alternative jacket designs, two of which incorporated a small photograph. Ruth especially liked those, but Billy Collins preferred the Swallowtail. (RA to C &RE, 18.9.44: ‘he likes the two without the photographs best–I like those with the photographs’). She added that Collins had liked the Ellises’ work ‘better than anything else which has been submitted’. Another artist had also been working on the New Naturalist jackets, ‘but he has had to give it up’ (RA to C&RE, 8.9.44); who that artist was we have been unable to discover.
Jacket design, front and back cover, by C&RE for the King Penguin series, printed in four colours and published in 1946.
Billy Collins had indeed liked the design. It is a fair guess that he had looked for an original and arresting style of jacket from the start and had given his blessing to Ruth’s apparently solo venture. Collins saw the job of the jackets to sell books, and hence they were his responsibility and not that of the New Naturalist Board, whose purpose was, rather, to achieve high and consistent scientific standards for the series. He ignored (though tactfully) the Board’s strongly expressed preference for photographic jackets, and invited the Ellises to design jackets for the first six books. They were offered 12 guineas per jacket and three guineas extra for the specially designed colophon. Their fees later rose more or less in line with inflation, but were always modest.
The original colophon for the New Naturalist library, designed by c&re in 1944.
The decision, therefore, to commission C&RE was made by Billy Collins alone and in the teeth of opposition. The (newly discovered) Board minutes grumpily note that ‘it had been agreed that Messrs Collins, knowing the Editors’ views on the subject, would be entirely responsible for the production of the Wrapper’ (NN Board, 9.9.45). ‘It really is a question of pleasing Mr Collins’, Ruth Atkinson had told the Ellises, ‘and not the naturalists’ (RA to C?, 17.10.44).
The Board might have had a stronger case for a photographic jacket if they had some strong photographs to show. But in 1945, good colour photographs of wildlife in natural surroundings were still rare; nearly all the colour photographs in the first New Naturalist titles had to be commissioned specially with Adprint’s precious stocks of American Kodak. Butterflies included some ground-breaking shots of live butterflies taken in colour by Sam Beaufoy, but even so it is hard to find even one that would make a satisfactory book jacket.
Early in 1945, James Fisher had been deputised by the Board to visit Clifford and Rosemary in Bath to find out more about their ideas and techniques. ‘I hope you get on well with Fisher and win him over to the idea of non-photographic jackets which will be a major achievement’, wrote Ruth to Clifford, perhaps a little nervously (RA to C ?, 22.1.45). Fisher, it seems, was indeed won over, but other members of the Board, especially Julian Huxley, Eric Hosking and John Gilmour, were not, at least not at first. Hosking, in particular, felt that the credo of the series, and its unique selling point of specially taken colour photographs, demanded a photographic jacket. After viewing the first few jackets, seemingly with tight lips, the Board gradually grew to admire them, and, by 1948, they were all full of praise for that of The Badger.
For the time being, however, when advance copies of the first two New Naturalists lay on the table before them (with photographers invited in to record the occasion), this is all the minutes have to say about it: ‘Dr Huxley said he still did not like the idea of non-photographic wrappers but as he understood that it was impossible to change now, would it be possible for future volumes to try out some other artist as well?’ Eric Hosking suggested Jack Armitage as a possible alternative. John Gilmour asked that in future the editors, if not the authors, be shown the jacket designs before the books were printed, which Collins agreed to. He [i.e. Collins] added that ‘he was quite willing later on to try out some other artist but that no series of wrappers which Collins had produced had ever been so successful as these with booksellers and others, and that he was of the opinion that the artists who are designing them were first class and great experts’ (NN Board meeting, 15.11.45).
That was the end of the matter. The channel of communication between artist and publishers lay not with the Board but almost entirely with Collins and his editors, first Ruth Atkinson and later Raleigh Trevelyan, Jean Whitcombe, Patricia (‘Patsy’) Cohen, Michael Walter, Libby Hoseason and Robert MacDonald. Billy Collins, one suspects, had no intention of ‘trying out’ any other artist, whatever he might have said to Huxley. He had ‘for more than thirty years been unfailing in his generous and kind encouragement to us’, wrote Clifford and Rosemary after Collins’ death in 1976. ‘To us it was an ideal patron and artist relationship’ (C&RE to Lady Collins, 22.9.76).
The Ellises were commissioned to design jackets for the first six books and then another six, after which their commission became open-ended. The artists admired the series and felt committed to it. Despite a few hiccups along the way, most notably when the standard of printing fell in the early 1950s, they enjoyed the work. Including the monographs, C&RE produced 86 jacket designs over 40 years, plus many more for books that, for one reason or another, never reached publication stage. After Clifford’s death, Rosemary recalled how designing the jackets made ‘such a refreshing change to the problems of running an academy. The manuscript and the wherewithal for doing a jacket often came on holiday with us and I have happy memories of sitting outside a tent with Clifford in some remote part of Europe working on the designs’ (RE to Crispin Fisher, 1985).
It is surely Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, as much as anyone, who established the ‘brand image’ of the New Naturalist series, and helped to make it the most long-running, and latterly also the most collectable, library of books in the natural history world. In return, the books have kept the work of C&RE alive and made their images some of the most eye-catching and distinctive in modern publishing.
There is no written record of the exact process in which the first New Naturalist jackets were printed, and there are unlikely to be any living witnesses to remember. We know, however, that they were printed by Baynard Press in London and by offset lithography. Further clues survive among the correspondence, which, though as it survives is one-sided and often cryptic, reveals at least that the method was based on photography. Using their great experience of the lithographic medium, C&RE always did their level best to make life as easy as possible for the printer.
Lithography is a method of printing from a flat surface. The name comes from Greek words meaning ‘stone-writing’, for lithographic prints traditionally used a flat stone surface to transfer the image from artwork to paper. The artist drew with a crayon on a slab of carefully prepared limestone. After the drawing has been prepared, prints are taken from it by dampening the stone and charging it with greasy printing ink. The technique is based on the principle that oil and water do not mix. From the early years of the 20th century the process was mechanised by the ‘flat-bed offset machine’, in which the paper received the print from an intermediary process, a smooth rubber roller. Offset printing prepared the ground for the flowering of poster art in which graphic designs from serious artists appeared in the hallways of railway stations and London Underground, and on advertisement hoardings originally intended to hide unsightly development.
The advantage of lithography is that it enables the artist’s work to be reproduced in limitless numbers without any alteration of the original design. Among the outstanding printers and proponents of colour lithography were Curwen Press and Baynard Press, both of which had close links with the London art schools and printed posters by contemporary artists, including Clifford and Rosemary Ellis. From 1935, Baynard Press employed one of the best-known craftsman-printers of the day, Thomas Edgar Griffits (1883–1957), known as ‘the Indefatigable Griffits’, who shared the secrets of his craft in two mainstream books, The Technique of Colour Printing by Lithography (1948) and The Rudiments of Lithography (1956). Griffits was a skilled interpreter or ‘translator’ of other artists’ work. He was also something of a lithographic missionary.
Once Collins had decided to use the Ellis designs, the question was where to print them. During October 1944, Ruth Atkinson costed the alternatives of photogravure or lithography before deciding on the latter. She met Thomas Griffits, who advised her that the most cost-effective way of printing the jackets would be ‘photo-litho with a deep etch for the line’, and for the prints to be made on rough paper (presumably using matt printing inks). He was also ‘most decided about the fewer colours the better’. Hence Clifford and Rosemary designed most of their New Naturalist jackets as ‘camera-ready artwork’ in four colours or fewer, relying on tones and overlaps to tease out more colours. Finally, Griffits advised that they produce artwork at exactly the same size of the printed jacket, for otherwise ‘a great deal of the subtlety of detail’ would be lost (remarks conveyed to C&RE by Ruth Atkinson, undated but late 1944).
Colour sketch for the jacket of the unpublished Ponds, Pools and Puddles by C&RE, mid-1970s. This title, also known as Ponds, Pools and Protozoa, was to have been Sir Alister Hardy’s third contribution to the series, after the two Open Sea books. By complete contrast with the vast expanses of ocean, this book would be devoted to ‘the microscopic life of the little waters’. Hardy approved the colour sketch, although he had reservations about the much-magnified organisms shown beneath the surface of the pond. Unfortunately, Hardy never found time to complete the book, though it remained a desired title and is now slowly heading towards publication.
It may seem surprising that the House of Collins, which was a printer as well as a publisher, did not decide to print the jackets in-house. The probable reason is that C&RE’s designs were closer to an art print than most book jacket designs, and that this required the skills of experienced art printers. Clifford no doubt convinced Ruth Atkinson that their work needed an experienced ‘translator’. The Ellis designs required exact colours printed in the right order, and the characteristically fuzzy outline of their colours needed an experienced interpreter.
The printer normally worked from the three primary colours, plus black. Mixing these was a craft in itself. For example, wrote Thomas Griffits in 1956, ‘by adding a little orange, green or violet to any of the primaries a less harsh and more pleasant hue is obtained.’ Darkening a colour with black was to be avoided as it detracted from its luminosity. Lighter colours were obtained not by mixing in white but by stippling the plate or adding chalk. Further colours could be obtained by overprinting, but it was important to print these in the correct order. For example, green printed on top of violet could produce (unlikely as it might sound) an attractive pale grey, while printing violet on top of green might achieve nothing but a muddier shade of violet. Certain colours go well together and enhance one another, while others, like green-blue next to blue, have the reverse effect.
For each jacket C&RE made a full colour design using water-based paint: mainly gouache but sometimes with additional watercolours, and incorporating the white of the paper. With the design came instructions pencilled underneath for the exact colours, and the order in which they should be printed. They prepared separate artwork for the series colophon and the title lettering. On most of the books published in the 1940s, the title and name of the author was hand-lettered on the title band, while for nearly every title up to No. 24 (Flowers of the Coast) the colophon was individualised with a symbol of the book’s contents. Several jackets were produced by different techniques during a brief period of experimentation in 1950–1. From 1970, the jackets were produced by a completely different method.
In some cases the original artwork of the New Naturalist jackets has survived (and is reproduced for the first time in this book). Some retain registration marks which indicate that the artwork was photographed by a special plate camera. Each colour would be separated by the blockmaker as ‘film positives’ and then transferred on to a lithographic plate. A comparison between the surviving Ellis artwork and the printed jacket shows how faithful the results could be in the hands of experienced operators.
Colour separations for Ponds, Pools and Puddles.
Tricky jackets: cost-cutting experiments were made over the printing of Wild Flowers of Chalk & Limestone and Birds & Men in 1950–51.
Jackets that were to be printed by the thousand in a single production run required power presses. By 1945, automatically fed printing machines could run at high speeds ranging from 2,500 to 5,000 impressions per hour. All but one of the first 15 New Naturalist jackets were printed by Baynard Press (the exception was The Art of Botanical Illustration which was probably done in-house). The colours of these jackets are wonderfully harmonious, with subtle, pleasing tones quite unlike the brighter but harsher ‘Pantone’ inks of the 1970s. Six proof copies of each jacket were normally made, one of which was sent to the artists for their approval, while another was circulated at New Naturalist Board meetings.
By 1950, however, Collins was looking elsewhere to print the jackets. The costs of book production, and colour printing in particular, had soared while sales were falling. Furthermore, Collins’s alliance with Adprint had come to a premature end in 1950 when the latter found the series ‘no longer an economic proposition’. The Collins printing factory in Glasgow was clamouring to do the job. The then editor, Raleigh Trevelyan, was minded to try it out for the next jacket, Wild Flowers of Chalk & Limestone. It would require changes in the way the jackets were prepared, and opened the way to a period of unsuccessful experimentation. The results were at first lamentable. The printers could not reproduce the colours accurately enough without using screens that diminished their impact. The artists thereupon drew the design afresh as colour separations on plastic transparencies, and, when that did not work either, directly on to the printing plate.
After yet more trouble finding alternative ways of printing the jacket of Birds & Men, Clifford dropped a strong hint that they were getting fed up with the whole business. Billy Collins wisely stepped in and instructed the editor to print the jacket in the usual way. Even so, the artists were asked to try again with colour separations for The Greenshank and An Angler’s Entomology, in the first case using only two colours. From 1951, the blocks for the jackets were no longer prepared by Baynard Press but by Odhams Ltd, a Watford-based ‘gravure printing house’ which owned modern offset presses. The blocks were then sent to the Collins factory for printing. The method now relied on what the correspondence refers to as the ‘line method’. At first it was what Clifford called ‘a flukey business’ (cE, 12.1.52) resulting in harsh gradations with ‘everything very sharp and black’ (the jacket of The Greenshank being the worst example). Nor could the new printers match Baynard Press’s skill in mixing and matching colours. The jacket of Flowers of the Coast was a dismal failure, while the artwork of The Sea Coast and The Weald was tampered with and ‘mutilated’ by the blockmakers.
The standard of printing soon began to improve, and there are fewer problems on record from the mid-1950s onwards, though the fine touch and delicacy of colour that marked the earlier jackets is lacking. More problems surfaced in the 1960s, when the gap between the artists’ intentions and the printer’s capacity to meet them seemed to widen again. On the Nature Conservation jacket, for example, the printers seem to have given up and used a coarse screen for the overlaps, while for Grass and Grasslands they printed the colours in the wrong order.
Good and bad solutions: The jacket of Nature Conservation in Britain was printed with the help of a colour-deadening screen, while Man & Birds was the first jacket to benefit from combining sets of colour separations.
Dissatisfaction with these jackets led to a major overhaul in the way the jackets were produced and printed. By now the artist could indicate the exact tone or shade required by reference to a ‘Pantone’ number. The Ellises decided that better results could be obtained by using ‘colour separations’ since these enabled the printers to reproduce the artwork with greater precision, and allowed the artists greater freedom to create bold and colourful designs. It involved them in the difficult task of producing a jacket which would be seen only after it was proofed (Clifford memorably compared it with reading the musical score of a quartet). Fortunately C&RE were experienced hands at such ‘reading’, in which four sets of brushwork in black paint on white watercolour paper would in due course become a well-realised colour jacket. By 1970, this craft-based method was a rarity in the field of commercial art. Michael Walter, the experienced Collins editor of the time, said that the Ellis hand-brushed artwork separations were the only non-mechanical colour separations (apart from maps) he had ever seen.
Brighter and more transparent printing inks meant brighter, more luminous jackets and allowed the artists to adopt a looser style in which dry brushwork produced the characteristic fuzzy-edged colour masses of what one might call the Ellis’s late period. To help the printers, and also allow the Collins editor to get at least an idea of how the printed jacket should look, they also provided a colour sketch (which was in some cases a close match to the printed jacket). The new method of production by colour separations continued until the last Ellis jacket, The Natural History of Orkney.
When Robert Gillmor came to design the jackets in 1985, he used a similar technique, though drawing the colour separations on sheets of clear plastic instead of watercolour paper. From 1986, the jackets were printed by the offset machines of Radavion Press in Reading, sufficiently close to his workplace for Gillmor to be present at each printing and so able to make any necessary last-minute adjustments and to choose the proof that best matched his conception. After Robert Gillmor moved to Norfolk in 1998, the jackets were printed in much the same way (and with Robert looking on) by the Norwich-based Saxon Photolitho Ltd until 2004 when the jackets began to be printed overseas. Over time, Robert has varied his technique, using linocuts more and more to add vitality to the designs (Gillmor, 2006). These changes are discussed in the main text under the appropriate jacket.