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top row: The Division Bell by Pink Floyd; A Rush of Blood to the Head by Coldplay.
bottom row: London Calling by The Clash; Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield.
The Royal Mail follows its series of British Design Classics postage stamps with a series dedicated to what they call “classic” album covers. The design classics in [...]

Another charity shop book-raid this week netted me a copy of Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in its 1965 Pan Books edition, one of the Bond series with great covers designed by Richard Hawkey. The sight of the tiny Pan silhouette above reminded me that this logo was based on drawings commissioned from [...]

Patrick McGoohan as Number Six.
“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”
The Prisoner, which ran for seventeen episodes from 1967 to 1968, was the best original drama series there’s ever been on television. Period, as Harlan Ellison would say. Best because it grabbed the format of [...]

The Royal Mail issues this splendid set of stamps next month, celebrating their choice of “the greatest achievements of British design”. The set was designed by HGV with photography by Jason Tozer and regular readers will note two { feuilleton } cult items among the selection, the Penguin book jacket and Harry Beck’s London Underground [...]

The Royal Mail continues to rifle popular culture for suitable anniversary subjects, this week following its series of James Bond postage stamps with stamp sets celebrating the 50th anniversaries of Hammer’s first run of horror films and the Carry On series. I don’t think I’d use the word “celebration” in the case of the [...]

Penguin is really coming up with the goods these days, living up to their reputation as a house with high standards of cover design, unlike Picador and the shabby way they treated Cormac McCarthy recently.
Ian Fleming’s Bond novels are the latest to receive a makeover with some fabulous art from illustrator Michael Gillette. 2008 is [...]

Adonis Blue Butterfly.
Beautiful stamps for the second in a Royal Mail series intended to bring attention to endangered species. These will be issued on Tuesday and are designed by Andrew Ross using photography from the Natural History Museum. The Independent notes the irony of the Royal Mail printing these even as they’re building a [...]

Proving once again the centrality of James Bond to contemporary British identity, the Royal Mail releases these stamps on January 8th, 2008, the 100th anniversary of Ian Fleming’s birth. If a misogynist state assassin seems an awkward choice of cultural ambassador, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill present a more iconoclastic view of the super spy [...]

Previous posts about book covers or cover design.

• March of the Penguins

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

• The King in Yellow

• Samuel Beckett and Russell Mills

• Penguin science fiction

• Ma Petite Ville

• Groovy book covers

• Bugger Boy

• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

• Alan Aldridge: The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes

• Ronald [...]

Jeremy Brett in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.
A few words of praise for Jeremy Brett is his role as the world’s greatest detective, for my money the definitive screen Sherlock Holmes. I’ve spent the past few weeks working my way through the complete run of TV adaptations that Granada Television produced from 1984 [...]

More pulp madness as Mario Bava’s 1968 crime caper finally appears on DVD in the UK this week, a camp confection from an already very camp decade, although it pales beside the lurid excesses of Barbarella which was released in the same year. Both films were based on popular European comic strips, and both are [...]