Category: {books}

Books

Peake’s Pan

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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 Raymond 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.

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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

Jerry by Paul Cadmus

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Jerry (1931).

A few weeks too early for Bloomsday, this painting by Paul Cadmus was in the news this week after being acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art. The subject is Jerry French, one of the artist’s regular models and also his lover during this period. I hadn’t seen this picture before and wonder whether this is the first painted representation of Joyce’s Ulysses, a book which at the time was still banned in the USA. The ban was overturned in 1933 following some enlightened deliberation by Judge John M Woolsey.

Jerry takes its place as part of the Toledo Museum’s permanent collection next month. Via Towleroad.

• Paul Cadmus gallery at Ten Dreams

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Paul Cadmus, 1904–1999

Samuel Beckett and Russell Mills

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This 1979 Picador edition of The Beckett Trilogy is one of my favourite paperback cover designs. The “illustration” (as it’s described on the back) is a photograph of an artwork by artist/designer Russell Mills and the minimal credit gives no indication as to whether it was Mills who was responsible for the striking type layout. I’ve noted previously the equally striking Picador designs by the Quay Brothers who were responsible for both art and layout on their covers. Mills extended his work into graphic design later with album cover designs (and some book design) for Brian Eno, David Sylvian, David Toop and others so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt in this case.

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The Picador edition of Murphy was published in 1983 and comprises part of this week’s book haul. The three small Mills paintings suit the novel but I prefer his sculptural and collage works. I’ve taken to collecting more of these older Picador editions in recent years since they don’t turn up secondhand as often as they used to. As with the Quay Brothers and Italo Calvino, I wonder now how many Beckett covers Mills produced for Picador. The books list More Pricks than Kicks and Company in addition to these titles. He was still working for them up to 1986 when he and Brian Eno collaborated on the graphics for Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Unlike the world of Penguin collecting, this area lacks adequate documentation; further investigation is required.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Thursday Afternoon by Brian Eno
• Crossed destinies revisted
• Beckett directs Beckett
• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino
• The art of Shinro Ohtake
• Not I by Samuel Beckett
• Film by Samuel Beckett