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 the earlier series deserved the term—a  Mini motor car, a Penguin book cover, the London Underground map, etc—whereas here we have the word “classic” being used in its lazy journalist sense where it becomes a synonym for “popular” and “familiar”, two attributes which often diminish with time.

top row: Parklife by Blur; Power, Corruption and Lies by New Order.
bottom row: IV by Led Zeppelin; Screamadelica by Primal Scream.

It should be noted that the choice of cover art was limited to releases by UK artists, and the designs had to be readable at the very small size of a postage stamp. Even so, I can’t help but regard this as a missed opportunity. There was no need to feature the Beatles since they’d been given their own set of stamps in 2006, but I’ve never thought of the cover of Let It Bleed (below) as a classic, even though musically it’s one of the best Stones albums. I’d rather choose Andy Warhol’s cover for Sticky Fingers but you can imagine the upset at stamp users being forced to lick a picture of a bulging pair of jeans. As for Pink Floyd’s Division Bell, it’s a typically striking design from Storm Thorgerson but does anyone really think it’s more classic than earlier Floyd covers, not least the Dark Side of the Moon prism which even people who hate the band can instantly recognise? Nearly all these choices seem confused or compromised; the Clash cover is the token punk offering—Royal Mail wouldn’t dare choose Never Mind the Bollocks—but Ray Lowry’s design was copied from an Elvis Presley sleeve; Led Zeppelin’s IV is a great album but other releases had far better covers; Primal Scream, another great album but the whole sleeve design is perfunctory; the Blur choice is merely bewildering.

left: Let It Bleed by The Rolling Stones; right: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie.

As far as designers go, Hipgnosis (via Storm T), Peter Saville (New Order), and Stylorouge (Blur) are included here but there’s nothing from Barney Bubbles, Malcolm Garrett, 23 Envelope, Neville Brody, Designer’s Republic or any of the other pioneering British designers of the past 30 years. The trouble with those names, of course, is that many of the artists they worked for aren’t popular or familiar enough to the average British stamp purchaser so their work can’t be deemed “classic”. A best of British, then, which could have been a lot better.

Classic Album Covers will be issued on January 10th, 2010.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• British Design Classics
• Stamps of horror
• Endangered insects postage stamps
• James Bond postage stamps
• Please Mr. Postman

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 Mervyn Peake when the company was launched at the end of the Second World War. The design persisted for many years, usually printed on a yellow background.

I wasn’t sure I had a copy of Peake’s original version to hand but G Peter Winnington’s Peake biography, Vast Alchemies (2000), includes a reproduction, one of two drawings Peake produced for the publisher. The other can be seen on this Pan Books site which also reveals that Peake’s Pans were printed at quite large size on the initial run of books. The design model may have been the early Penguin style which nearly always had the famous bird prominently placed in the lower third of the cover. In book terms at least, the Penguin has proved to be the more powerful god, having survived virtually unchanged since 1935. Peake’s Pan is long gone, dropped in favour of two red squiggles.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Buccaneers #1
• Recovering Bond
• Mervyn Peake in Lilliput
• James Bond postage stamps
• Wanna see something really scary?
• T&H: At the Sign of the Dolphin

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 TV adventure series with both hands and subverted the expectations of the audience and the people who were paying for it. Best because it dared to do this at a time when there was little precedent for experiment in a medium that was barely a decade old. Best because it had something important to say while still being entertaining. And best because it had Patrick McGoohan in the central role at the peak of his acting career.

Fiction can be anything but to look at what we’re offered by TV studios you wouldn’t know it. Cop shows, hospital shows, detective shows and soap operas proliferate, ad infinitum. The Prisoner came out of Danger Man, an immensely successful post-James Bond spy series which may have been popular but, McGoohan’s presence aside, has little to recommend it today. It lacked the camp bravura of The Avengers and couldn’t compete with the budgets of the Bond films. But it’s fair to say that without it McGoohan wouldn’t have had the chance to do something radical. ITC’s Lew Grade thought he was getting Danger Man 2 with better production values; what he received—to his eventual dismay—was the kind of television one would expect if the staff of Michael Moorcock’s speculative fiction magazine New Worlds had been given a fat budget and free reign. Like New Worlds, The Prisoner seized familiar genre themes but took them as a means to an end, not an end in themselves. The series borrowed from science fiction and spy thrillers—brainwashing and mind control, Cold War paranoia, the limitless surveillance and duplicity of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—and used a drama format to say something direct and personal to its audience about individual freedom, the limits and excesses of the state and the importance of being able to say “No” when the world insists that you capitulate.

Number Six by Roland Topor.

McGoohan was the driving force as well as the star. His own company, Everyman Films, produced the series for ITC, he planned everything with the writers, wrote three episodes and directed five of them himself. The Prisoner only lasted for a season and a half—cut short after Grade lost his patience—but the form was potentially endless, able to present a familiar Cold War spy story on the one hand, while having an entire episode play as a Western, on the other. In one of the later episodes McGoohan is largely absent when his mind is transferred to another man’s body and he finds himself living a new life, ostensibly a free man. (But freedom in The Prisoner is always circumscribed.) The last three episodes collapse everything that’s preceded them into intense and increasingly surreal psychodrama. Like Moorcock’s fluid character Jerry Cornelius, whose exploits were running in New Worlds while The Prisoner was being broadcast, McGoohan had found a vehicle to say what he wanted about the world using popular culture. It’s a coincidence but I’ve always found it apt that the cover illustration for Moorcock’s novella The Deep Fix (1966) included a figure obviously modelled on McGoohan’s Danger Man. The book’s tagline “Drugs took him into a nightmare world where logic ceased to exist” could be a description of a later Prisoner episode. Apt too that the first novel based on the series in 1969 was by New Worlds regular Thomas M Disch.

(James Colvin was a Moorcock nom-de-plume.)

The Prisoner was produced in the era of the social dramas of The Wednesday Play and Play for Today yet it remains relevant in a way its worthier contemporaries could scarcely manage. Social realism dates as quickly as yesterday’s news but allegory stays fresh. And it’s a dismal truth that the world of infinite surveillance has crept closer in a way that few would have imagined possible in 1968. The cameras which follow McGoohan’s Number Six everywhere are a familiar sight on Britain’s streets; a headline in yesterday’s Independent newspaper read: “Big Brother database a ‘terrifying’ assault on traditional freedoms“. McGoohan was raised in Ireland and would have appreciated the adherence of another Irishman, James Joyce, to the Luciferian cry of disobedience in Ulysses, “Non serviam!”—I will not serve. Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus defies God and his family; McGoohan’s Number Six defies everything else. That example, of the man who can “make putting on his dressing gown appear as an act of defiance”, is something we need as much now as we did in 1968. Hollywood is currently threatening a big screen version but why wait for more compromised studio product when you can go to the source. Get yourself a deep fix—it’s a masterpiece.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Thomas M Disch, 1940–2008
• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

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 map.

British Design Classics will be available from January 13th, 2009.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Stamps of horror
• Endangered insects postage stamps
• James Bond postage stamps
• Please Mr. Postman

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 latter, I seem to be in the minority in always having regarded the Carry On films with considerable loathing, despite the best efforts of Kenneth Williams (who hated them) and company; give me some wit, please, not the laboured double entrendres of Talbot Rothwell.

Grievances aside, it’s gratifying to see the original posters used for these stamp designs, the Dracula one is especially good, suitably so seeing as it’s the best film of the lot. “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough,” says Noah Cross in Chinatown; based on this evidence the same could also be said of cheap cinema.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Horror comics
• Endangered insects postage stamps
• James Bond postage stamps
• Please Mr. Postman
• Hail, horrors! hail, infernal world!

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 Fleming’s centenary so the books have been republished as demi-format hardbacks with these new designs adorning the jackets. Each cover features a different girl matched to the theme of the book (yes, I know they’re women but in Bond’s world women are always girls unless they’re Miss Moneypenny); each cover also features groovy period type which alludes to the hand-drawn elaborations of the Sixties and Seventies. The effect is reminiscent of the poster art for the 1967 film of Casino Royale (below) which used a naked girl as the focal point; all Bond posters before and after this place oo7 himself centre stage. Penguin even dare to push the level of pastiche by making On Her Majesty’s Secret Service look rather like an old romance novel, not such a surprising decision since this is the book where Bond gets married.

My favourite Bond covers remain the old Pan paperbacks from 1963 but that’s just me; these look great. There’s been a persistent moan recently from authors and publishers worrying about file sharing as they foresee the publishing world going the same way as the music business. The solution is obvious: you can’t stop texts being copied and distributed but you can make the books themselves desirable objects so make them worth buying and owning. Penguin has numbered the spines of the new Bond books as they did with their recent Sherlock Holmes reprints, a smart appeal to book collectors as well as a tip to read them in the order they were written. “Smart” is the key word here; Picador take note.

Update: The Pan covers mentioned above were designed by Richard Hawkey. Bond site MI6.co.uk has some details about the designer.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Repackaging Cormac
• The World’s Greatest Detective
• James Bond postage stamps
• Boys Own Books

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 new distribution depot at West Thurrock which will destroy natural habitats. Invertebrate Conservation Trust Buglife had tried and failed to prevent the development.

top: Silver-spotted Skipper, Red Barbed Ant, Stag Beetle.
centre: Noble Chafer Beetle, Barberry Carpet Moth, Purbeck Mason Wasp.
bottom: Southern Damselfly, Field Cricket, Hazel Pot Beetle.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Robert Lang’s origami insects
• James Bond postage stamps
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard
• Wesley Fleming’s glass insects
• Please Mr. Postman
• Insect Lab

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 in the Black Dossier, the latest volume in their unfolding history of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Good to see that the stamp designs above include the Pan paperback covers from 1963. (The other examples are the first editions from Jonathan Cape, the 2006 Penguin reprints and what appear to be a set of Seventies reissues.) A friend of mine at school had a collection of the Pan books and they remain my favourite Bond book designs, not least because they were some of the first book covers to strike me as being well-designed rather than well-illustrated. What the Flickr link doesn’t show is the die-cut holes in the Thunderball jacket which made the cover seem as though it was pierced by bullets, the kind of expensive production detail you rarely see on anything other than a bestseller.

And while we’re on the subject of Bond design, Daniel Kleinman’s superb Casino Royale title sequence is on YouTube.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Please Mr. Postman

Previous posts about book covers or cover design.

• Nabokov book covers

• Netherlands decorated books

• 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 Searle book covers

• The faces of Parsifal

• The monstrous tome

• Reynard the Fox

• The New Love Poetry

• Phallic worship

• The art of Ian Miller

• Recovering Bond

• Old book covers

• Pasticheur’s Addiction

• Arthur Machen book covers

• Repackaging Cormac

• Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers

• The World’s Greatest Detective

• Dorian Gray revisited

• Beardsley’s Salomé

• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

• James Bond postage stamps

• Stevenson and the dynamiters

• Decorated Russian book covers

• Russian book jackets, 1917–1942

• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal

• Kafka and Kupka

• Philip José Farmer book covers

• Crossed destinies revisted

• Jack Kerouac book covers

• Wanna see something really scary?

• The art of Bob Pepper

• Philip K Dick book covers

• Masonic fonts and the designer’s dark materials

• Boys Own Books

• Penguin designer David Pelham talks

• Fantastic art from Pan Books

• Penguin Surrealism

• Hospital by Toby Litt

• Cormac McCarthy book covers

• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino

• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

• Thomas Allen’s paperback art

• Perfume: the art of scent

• City of Spades

• DIY aesthetics

• Penguin book covers

• Dorothy Parker

• War of the Worlds book covers

• JG Ballard book covers

• William Burroughs book covers

• Czech book covers

• The Absolute Elsewhere

• The Hetzel editions of Jules Verne

• Gay book covers

More archive pages:
• The archive page archive

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 to 1993, being bowled over again by Brett’s mastery of the role. It took me a while to notice these when they were first screened, British television was churning out a lot of costume drama at the time and the sight of more Hansom cabs and gas lamps paled beside the audacity and excitement of contemporary thrillers such as the BBC’s Edge of Darkness. I think I caught on during the second season that Brett’s performance was something special, and that these adaptations were treating the Holmes stories with a veracity rarely seen before.

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle by original Holmes illustrator Sidney Paget.

Brett was a dependable but not necessarily distinguished actor prior to Sherlock Holmes. Having been passed over for James Bond in favour of Roger Moore in the Seventies, he seemed determined to make an impression with a role that’s become a challenge over the years given the weight of precedent attached to it. He pored over the books obsessively and even argued with directors over minor story points if he felt that Conan Doyle’s intentions were being lost. I remember finding his performance a bit eccentric at first but his unorthodox portrayal of a gentleman—vaulting over a couch to answer the door—helped separate him from the stock of solid Victorian types around him and acted as a visual signifier of the detective’s genius. Brett was very energetic in the first few seasons and always great in the close-ups, with a furious intensity that believably portrayed a man possessed of a brain working several orders of magnitude above the ordinary. We know now that some of that intensity was a result of his manic depression which worsened following his wife’s death in 1985.

But a great performance wouldn’t have shone without a suitable setting and it’s to Granada’s credit that they went to so much trouble over period detail. A Victorian-era Baker Street was built outdoors at the Granada studios complete with fully-stocked shop interiors. One of the pleasures for this Manchester citizen is seeing how many familiar locations our local TV company used. I recall walking past Manchester Town Hall circa 1988 when filming was taking place there, with vans along the street and a horse and carriage waiting to be called. They used the Town Hall courtyard a great deal, over-much if you recognise Alfred Waterhouse’s Venetian Gothic architecture. Splendid use is made of some of England’s country houses and there are some stunning shots later of genuine London streets which—with judicious camera placement and a few costumed extras—still looked as they did in 1900.

Eric Porter as Professor Moriarty.

Most crucially, the stories were taken seriously on their own terms, without any of the cliché that’s become a feature of so many screen representations of Holmes. Some liberties are taken now and then with the adaptations but for the most part the stories (and the audience) are treated with respect. (It’s a surprise now to see a primetime TV drama have its main character quote Flaubert in French and offer no translation.) The deerstalker hat appears occasionally but only when Holmes and Watson are in the country; in the city Holmes wears a silk topper. And the character of Watson is always portrayed sympathetically by David Burke (who left after series two) and Edward Hardwicke, both worlds away from the bumbling Nigel Bruce in the Basil Rathbone films. Guest support in each episode came from a range of great British acting talent—Charles Gray (as Mycroft), Eric Porter (as Moriarty), John Thaw, Dennis Quilley, Harry Andrews, Ronald Lacey, Rosalie Crutchley—so many of whom have died in recent years that the series now has a strangely melancholy atmosphere, like watching a procession of ghosts.

Holmes obsessives can and do quibble over the merits of these adaptations but we’re unlikely to see the (nearly) entire run of stories filmed so faithfully any time soon. The Granada films were all shot on 16mm, a relatively cheap format no longer used in television. To repeat this effort would be ruinously expensive, even if they could find actors to match Brett and company. For that reason it’s unfortunate that the company didn’t manage to fulfil its intention of filming all the stories but Jeremy Brett’s health grew increasingly worse from 1990 onwards. The really sad thing about watching the films from start to finish is seeing his deterioration in the final episodes from the energetic actor that began the series. He died of a heart attack in 1995. But it’s the energetic actor that we remember and celebrate, and the performance that remains his monument.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka
• Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• Boys Own Books

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 connected by the presence of John Phillip Law, the sexiest (male) screen angel in Barbarella and the star of Danger Diabolik. Barbarella’s adventures on page and screen managed to be equally frivolous whereas master thief Diabolik in the original fumetti (which is still running) was rather more serious, at least in serial adventure terms. Bava forgoes any attempt to treat his subject with a straight face, opting instead for the knowing action comedy style that was popular during the Sixties, whether in post-Bond fare such as Our Man Flint or superior TV series like The Avengers.

Diabolik stands apart from his contemporaries, and from other campy comic spin-offs such as the Sixties Batman, by being an anti-hero in a field over-stuffed with costumed vigilantes and misogynist super-spies. Most characters of this type are descendants of deathless arch-criminal Fantômas, and Diabolik can perhaps be seen as a trendy updating of the Fantômas type, with his black leather bondage outfit and ultra-cool E-type Jaguar, probably the only car ever made in Britain that would impress style-conscious Italians. The comic strip was created in 1962 by two sisters, Angela and Luciana Giussani, a feat one imagines would be impossible in the male-dominated world of American comics at that time.

The fumetti Diabolik shuns firearms in favour of knife-throwing expertise, something that Bava ignores by giving him a boring machine gun. Bava directed a very silly James Bond spoof, Doctor Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, two years earlier, and always had a great eye for aesthetics even when lacking an adequate budget. His horror films frequently outdid Hammer for Gothic atmosphere and his strange science fiction/horror, Planet of the Vampires (1965), features a cast similarly sheathed in shiny black spacesuits. The clouds of coloured fog those astronauts encounter reappear as the coloured smoke Diabolik uses to evade his pursuers. His underground super-pad is one of the more spectacular villainous residences, like something Norman Foster might design for Dr. No. It certainly makes the Batcave look shabby, although, as with all these underground complexes, you can’t help wondering who the hell built them and how they managed to escape detection while doing so. The plot, such as it is, is some forgettable nonsense concerning Diabolik’s cat-and-mouse game with his chief adversary, Inspector Ginko. Michel Piccoli plays the inspector and it’s surprising seeing the splendid Terry-Thomas as a government official who Diabolik embarrasses with “exhilarating gas” at a press conference. The film is also embellished with a tremendously groovy score by Ennio Morricone.

One of my favourite comic strip heroes when I was a kid was Billy the Cat in the Beano, the adventures of a super-agile boy in a black leather catsuit (no eyebrow-raising, please). I always had a fondness for these kind of characters and I’m sure I would have loved Danger Diabolik for the cat burglary and the Sixties’ zaniness had I seen it on TV. My only gripe now is I can’t quite believe that Diabolik is all that interested in his female companion, Eva, despite the scene where they have sex on a revolving bed covered in dollar bills. If he’d rescued Alain Delon’s taciturn assassin from death at the end of Le Samouraï, he could find Eva a nice young man in Monte Carlo, Jef Costello (as Delon is named in Melville’s film) could whack the pesky Inspector Ginko then the pair could live together in subterranean peace, at least until the next heist. We can but dream.

Hat-tip to Mark Pilkington for alerting me to this in the first place. Bava’s Diabolikal influence lives on via Roman Coppola’s 2001 homage to Sixties’ camp, CQ, and the Beastie Boys’ video for Body Movin’.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fantômas
• The persistence of memory