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It was a surprise of the best sort last week when an e-mail dropped into my inbox from the Picture Editor for Penguin Press, Isabelle de Cat, requesting that I contact her with regard to a forthcoming addition to the Penguin Modern Classic imprint. (The title under discussion has long been published by Penguin, but after many years between the same covers, it was thought high time for a change of livery.) Things got even better this week when Isabelle wrote with news that at their ‘cover’ meeting, the team had decided to go with my image, and she’d be sending me the proposed lay-out before long. That has since arrived. It’s been beautifully done, though I fear I must keep you in suspense for a while yet before I can reveal it here. All in good time.
I had thought that perhaps John Coulthart’s recent use of a couple of my Mari Lwyd drawings reinvented as ‘imagined’ Penguin Modern Classics covers for M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, had been the spur to Penguin approaching me, but in fact the connection had come from elsewhere. All that may be said on the matter for the present, is that I grew up on Penguin, and so this is quite a thrill for me.
To illustrate this post without giving anything away, here are some spreads from Phil Baines’ engaging book Penguin by Design:
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Well I had to go to Waterstones yesterday searching for something to stock up my bag for holiday reading and found myself in the penguin section. How long I stood there thinking hmmm perhaps its that one…hmmm ooh perhaps its that one. What a treat for us all, more art and literature combined! I may have missed this info as there are so many well earned congratulations but did they give you any idea when it would be out?
I think this re-edition is intended to come onto the market next year. Long wait. Sorry!
YAY!!!!!!!!
Ha ha! I wondered when I’d hear from you LBT. Good news huh?
Wow, terrific news, Clive! And great company to be in. I love all four of the covers in that top spread, and that they’re all so different! Some houses get stuck in a design rut, but Penguin never has.
I couldn’t be happier about my work being chosen for this. A big thrill.
Clive, how exciting is this? I keep a look out for the Penguin Poetry Series designed by Stephen Russ in the 60′s and 70′s, and I must now search out that book about Penguin covers! All too often the cover can be so iconic it can be remembered far more than the book itself. I hope you are working on a title that can do justice to your design and vice versa. Looking forward to the great reveal…..
Lesley, there are covers on old Penguin books that for me forever defined my visual sense of the titles they served.
The work for this was done long ago, so there’s been just the job for the Penguin designer to create a cover from it. But yes, the title is an iconic one, and I’m very happy to be the chosen artist for it.
Congratulations, can;t wait to see what it is! Is it a book you know and love or an unexpected choice? (Fish, fish… give us a clue!)
You’ll get no more from me here! (-;
Awesome. I hope it’s the first of many!
That would be good! (-;
That is great news, congrats to you. As a boy I would stumble upon Penguin editions at the local used book shop. I was as pleased by the beautiful cover art as I was by the very affordable price. Many of my treasures (many of which I still possess) were decades old; not only was i introduced to great literature, I was introduced to great art. What a wonderful legacy my friend, 30 years from now a young reader will stumble upon a beautiful cover, hidden in plain sight amongst dusty tomes and “discover” Clive Hicks-Jenkins, thrilling.
LG
Because I’ve always loved paperbacks so much, it was my secret hope from the start that if ever I became ‘known’ as a painter, then perhaps publishers might begin to use my images on their covers. When growing up I’d come across so much of interest on the covers of Penguin books. However, my first experience of making images for books came about with Frances and Nicolas McDowall at the Old Stile Press. Creating beautifully crafted letterpress books in small editions was a wonderful opportunity for an artist at the beginning of his career, though a universe away from commercial publishing. Later I did wrap-around images made specially for the two Old Stile Press bibliographies, which felt like the greatest honour. (They could have asked anybody. I can’t think of an artist who would have refused them.) I was having so much fun that I wasn’t worrying about my shelved dream of being on the covers of mass-edition books. Just as well, too, because the commercial publishers were staying away. And when they did finally knock at my door, the results were rarely good. I recall one little pen and ink drawing that was cropped and reversed and tinted a truly dreadful nicotine colour before being overlaid with the worst typography I’ve ever seen. That was my first experience, and it left me feeling pretty roughed up. More followed. Photoshop is a wonderful tool, but it encourages too many people with little skill to believe that they can design simply because they know how to hit a key.
At last things began to improve. I made a painting for the cover of Marly Youman’s Val/Orson for PS Publishing, and that turned out rather well. Seren used an image of my painting Green George on the cover of Damian Walford Davies’ Suit of Lights, and inside the book Damian included a poem about the painting. Later he asked me to make an image specially for his narrative poem Witch, again for Seren, and this time the designer Simon Hicks encouraged me to make the lettering for the title too. Marly convinced Stanza, an imprint of PS, to allow me to make a complete design for the cover of The Foliate Head, and moreover the publisher agreed that I could work with my brother-in-law, Andrew Wakelin, who designed the book inside and out. Beth Adams of Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal asked me to do a similar job of cover and interior decorations for Marly’s Thaliad. Beth will do the design herself. In this way, with both The Foliate Head and Thaliad, we’ve managed to bring at least a part of the design ethos of a private press edition… interior decorations made specially for the text and beautifully laid out pages… to mass-produced books. Fortunately there are no inflations of printing costs from adding images printed in black to the text, though the artist and designer have extra work. Nothing similar is likely to happen any time soon for me with a large publishing house project, but both Stanza and Phoenicia are small and hands-on operations, and so they were ideally set up to make one-off books that had a lot of design input from the artist. The two books are due to be ready for Autumn launches, and so we all wait with bated breath to see how they’re going to turn out.
Another cover beckons for a new collection of poems by Damian. I seem to have a bit of a thing going with poets. (The Book of Ystwyth was perhaps inevitable given the number of them I work with.) Over at Carolina Wren Press in the USA, they made a really fantastic job of adapting a painting of mine to a cover image for the poet Yvonne C. Murphy’s Aviaries. So currently there is a combination of works from my archive being chosen and adapted for book covers, plus the occasional exciting commission to make a cover image tailored to the title.
Most recently, the dream-come-true, an image of mine on a Penguin Classic. It’s taken a while to happen, but I’ve no complaints. I’ve learned a helluva lot on the journey, and left a few good books in my wake. Books made with The Old Stile Press are in major libraries all over the world. The stack of commercial books bearing covers of which I’m proud, grows. This year I made my first ‘artist’s books’, an experience I greatly enjoyed. Life is rich.
From what I have seen you have left a slew of ravishingly beautiful books in your wake; Penguin only makes them that more accessible. I do not pretend to know anything about design, but to paraphrase, “I know good design when I see it”. You certainly have mastered, with the cooperation of fine presses, the art of bookmaking that I love and treasure. Early in the 20th century you couldn’t get away from private presses (the “Lucia” series by Benson very wittily teases this phenomenon) but now, as you say, there are many hackneyed aspirants to the art keyboard at the ready.
You have worked hard, laurels await.
LG
Ha ha! Well you know what they say about laurels. No-one can afford to sit on them!
they get prickly (:
E. F. Benson, I recall, was a relative of Nicolas McDowall. I remember him telling me when I mentioned how much I liked Benson’s ghost stories. Small world.
Ghost stories by Benson? I wasn’t aware, will research.
Also need to research McDowall, not sure who he is… but yes, small, marvelous world!
Nicolas McDowall runs The old Stile Press in the Wye Valley, S. Wales. Since 1997 I’ve worked with Nicolas and his wife Frances on a total of seven projects: Palmyra Jones, The Affectionate Shepheard, Richard Barnfields’s Sonnets, The Mares Tale, Equus and the covers of their two bibliographies.
I see. As a fan of Benson, I would be tickled to rub shoulders with a relative (:
In a previous life when I worked at LWT in London we filmed Mapp and Lucia and I was fortunate to work on the second series, looking after Prunella Scales, who was an absolute joy to dress. We did lots of filming at Chilham Castle in Kent and four whole weeks in Rye in glorious sunshine. I have several of the hats from the series stored carefully in my loft and a silver button hook and shoe horn bought for me by Pru at the end of filming. She had to wear the most horrific fat padding to give her the right shape which she was teased about by the other cast members led by the ever mischieveous pair Geraldine McEwan and Nigel Hawthorne ‘Lucia and Georgie’ both doing so in character, which had the dressing room in stitches. The hotel we were based in was a carbon copy of Faulty Towers and we just loved every minute of the disorganised chaos. Even as I am writing this I sit smiling at the memories of long summer days working on such a fabulous story line with a great cast and crew.
How lovely to hear that P S is as lovely as one would imagine from the warmth and intelligence shining through her performances. I recall the series well. It was marvellous casting.
I am jealous as heck, I loved the Benson series. I read the novels first, later discovering the series taped. I was delighted with the portrayal. Not sure if the actors were in sync with my fantasy, but they are thoroughly seared into my brain, effectively blocking out any original concept. Just wonderful stuff.
I had quite different pictures of Mapp and Lucia in my head from reading the books, though Nigel Hawthorne was pretty spot-on with my vision of Georgie. However, the three actors had a wonderful chemistry and I was able to happily give myself up to their conjurings of Benson’s characters, knowing that when I turned again to the books, my original notions of them would emerge intact. (And they did!)
I should say that by contrast, I lost the Jean Brodie I carried with me from the Muriel Spark book once I’d seen the 1978 ‘mini-series’ based on it. Jay Presson Allen masterfully drew on the source material and the stage-play he had adapted from it, imaginatively expanding episodes that Spark only referred to in the novel. In this way the TV series became much more than either the play or the film. (Though not, of course, more than the book, which remains the best experience for those seeking Jean Brodie.) Since then Geraldine McEwan has become Brodie in my imagination (or Brodie has become McEwan) and there’s no getting back to whatever she was when I first read the novel and fell in love with it. Interestingly McEwan’s performance is the one that Muriel Spark commended most highly of Brodie’s many interpreters.
I fear that for me Jean Brodie eluded the great Maggie Smith in the 1969 film adaptation. Her character was too nice and more obviously foolish than the steely if deluded self-belief and self-aggrandisement that defined Spark’s Brodie, who is altogether a less loveable character. (McEwan much better caught Brodie’s sheer spite, a characteristic, if the biography is to be believed, of her author.) Long, long ago, I saw Eleanor Bron play Brodie on stage… I think at Bristol Old Vic… and she nailed her in a way no other has for me. McEwan’s may be the voice and inflection that I can’t get out of my head, but Bron’s performance was the almost supernatural summoning of Jean Brodie, and I wish that it had been committed to film.
Jean Brodie has become an iconic literary character, and she has been played by a good many interesting actors. However, while the play is entertaining enough, it is not a great one. Not a drama for all seasons embodying situations and characters that can be reinvented in ways that surprise. It is not Shakespeare. I think that fact will always limit what can be made of its protagonist. Jay Presson Allen’s work on the series produced by STV is probably as good as we’re ever going to see.
Interesting fact. I saw Vanessa Redgrave in the West End when she played Brodie. My memories of that experience are a little hazy. I was sitting in ‘the gods’, far away from the stage, and the players seemed distant and un-engaging. I hadn’t read the book at that time, and I was present only because one of my class mates from Italia Conti, Olivia Hussey, was playing Jenny in the play, shortly before she was to leap to cinematic fame as Juliet in Franco Zeferelli’s 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet.
Yes, Pru certainly was lovely, with a sharp sense of humour. Both her and Geraldine had a very keen eye for the ‘moment, and there was lots of laughter on the set. She said that once she had the hat and the shoes she had the character she was to play. So she would sit in the ‘fat’ padding (which covered down to elbows and knees!) plus her Mapp hat and shoes, crocheting in the dressing room. Somewhere I have a photograph which is quite bizarre. When we were called to set I’d drop the dress on and off we’d go. There was a beautifully produced double-spread picture gallery of the filming and Pru wrote on it ‘Dear Jacqui, Who dropped me in it EVERY DAY. Love Prunella (Scales)’ This always tickled me. I mean who else would the Prunella be? We were a happy band. It was the closest to theatre I found whilst working in TV. I missed the live element of stage work. Even now I prefer the backstage rather than front-of-house atmosphere of school productions and drama school shows that my children take part in.
I’ve just remembered the straw boater that Nigel wore. It had a leather lacing attached somewhere on his jacket so that if it blew off it wouldn’t fly away – I never knew whether that was part of his character or just mens wardrobe being careful!
Speaking as a one-time actor who wore a straw boater prone to blowing away, I can tell you that a safety thread attached to the nape of the jacket is a regular safeguard of mens’ headgear when on location. I had one myself after half a dozen Eton boaters had bowled away over the Yorkshire Moors never to be seen again!
aha all revealed. I wondered why it was raining straw boaters up north
Congratulations! That Phil Baines book is a great study. I also have a box of 100 postcards that Penguin made of their covers.
Thank you John. Funnily enough, I’d read the Baines book before starting work on Thaliad for Phoenicia Publishing, just to be sure to have my mind filled with good design and typography. When you posted about Viriconium I looked at it again, so it’s been getting plenty of use.
congratulations!!!!
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Thanks, Zoe.
oooooo that’s bril!! I can’t wait for your secret to be out – how you love to tantalise!!
Ha ha! Not me this time. I have to wait for permission.
And your cover image will look quite natty with his little penguin friend!
Indeed. Black and white is a classic combo for chic!
Exciting times, Clive! I look forward to hearing (and seeing) more!
As soon as I can Bev, rest assured.
Exciting news!
It was most welcome.
Great news Clive! We do love a Penguin classic.
Us too. Our bookshelves are striped with orange vintage Penguin livery! (-;