Art of the New Naturalists: A Complete History. Peter Marren

‘We are rather keen to get this design as soon as possible’, he went on, ‘as it is ahead of the other MSS in production’. Four days later, Ruth Atkinson was thanking Clifford for ‘the finished design for Butterflies … I like it very much and am delighted to have it so quickly and am sending it off to Mr Griffits today’ (RA to CE, 20.2.45).

      The modified design was in four colours, blue, yellow, orange and black, with shades of green produced by overlaps. White was let in by leaving the appropriate areas blank. Clifford was disappointed by the proof: the blue was not deep enough for the white title lettering to stand out distinctly, the greys and greens were insufficiently distinct, and the yellow had come out too orange. Not all these faults were overcome on the printed jacket. Nonetheless, Ruth expressed herself ‘extremely pleased’ by it, and Billy Collins felt ‘more pleased than ever with the wrapper now I see it on a book’ (wc to CE, 5.6.45).

      The Butterflies jacket was, in effect, a trial run. The initial problems with the printing were never fully overcome, and the effect is somewhat tentative and wishy-washy. In 1962, the printers decided to deepen the colours, especially the blue of the title band, by using a screening process, but the result was to cast a greyish smog over the whole design, making the jacket look rather grubby. But what mattered far more was the impact of the design: the first Ellis jacket proclaimed that these books were different: serious, modern, grown-up, challenging, new. For that message the last thing anyone wanted was another pretty butterfly on another pretty flower.

      Richard Lewington, the wildlife illustrator, writes: ‘For the jacket of a book about British butterflies the Swallowtail is a prime candidate as a subject. It’s large, rare and most people would recognise it, even if they had never seen one patrolling the Norfolk Broads. Its bold markings make it the butterfly equivalent of the avocet or the giant panda. The graphic image on the jacket of Butterflies is, however, surprising in that it is the equally striking caterpillar that takes centre stage, with the two butterflies in flight confined to the middle distance. To add colour and drama, the caterpillar’s orange osmeterium, used to scare predators, is inflated. I like the balance of the design, which also gives a hint of the butterfly’s habitat with the windmill in the distance, but feel the spine lets it down. It is too abstract and gives no clue as to the subject matter of the book.’

       2 British Game Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, 1945

      It was probably the striking jacket of British Game that settled the argument about whether to use photographs or artwork for the New Naturalist dust jackets. On 7 December 1944, William Collins professed himself ‘absolutely delighted with the partridge for British Game. I think it is quite lovely in every way’ (wc to CE, 7.12.44). He was commenting on the artists’ ‘rough’, twice the size of the printed jacket and against a grey background. On the finished design, sent in on 24 January, the artists substituted ‘umber brown’ for grey. Collins preferred the rough and hoped that they ‘would some day … be able to use the original colour scheme on another design’.

      This is a bolder, more confident jacket than Butterflies. An approximately life-size English partridge dominates the scene, its head twisted back above the title band, perhaps in tribute to the old masters of bird portraiture who showed large birds in this awkward attitude in order to fit them on the plate without reduction. The partridge is running towards the spine over an open down, its body language and alert eye (beautifully observed) suggesting alarm. Several birds in its covey have already taken off – wispy, almost abstract shapes on the left front and spine – and our bird will doubtless follow them shortly. The glory of the design lies in the colours: the ochre, terracotta and pale grey create a sepia-tinted landscape, a timeless vision of the old England of rolling hills, hedgerows, weed-fringed arable fields and abundant game that, in the immediate postwar period, might have caused a twinge of nostalgia.

      Copies of the jacket exist where the design has been mistakenly repeated on the back against an umber background. Possibly they were rejects brought in for the last remaining stocks of British Game in the late 1950s or 1960s to avoid the expense of printing a new batch.

      This jacket gave Collins the idea of a ‘big illustration-book of individual birds on the lines of Gould’ which he wanted James Fisher to write and Clifford Ellis to illustrate. He was still talking about it a month after the jacket was accepted, and a month is a long time in publishing.

      Artwork for British Game, 1945. The hand-lettered title and colophon were designed separately and combined by the printer.

       3 London’s Natural History R. S. R. Fitter, 1945

      The anonymous designer of the jacket of London’s Birds, 1949, by the same author, borrowed C&RE’s idea of juxtaposing seagulls and the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.

      The first design for London’s Natural History (originally titled Natural History of London), completed by October 1944, featured ducks on a pond. William Collins liked it and preferred it to the Butterflies jacket (at the time he had said of the latter, ‘nothing could be more lovely’; evidently it could). Soon afterwards C&RE produced a new version, keeping the idea of reflections in water, but substituting a livelier bird: a gull. The duck lived on inside the oval on the spine on the NN logo.

      London’s Natural History needed an image that said, clearly and unambiguously: London. C&RE found it in the dome of St Paul’s, an icon of the City’s suffering during the Blitz, only four years previously. But instead of the actual dome they showed its reflection in water, possibly just a puddle, possibly the River Thames (bombing and house clearance would just about have made that possible in 1945). Everyone liked the design, but, wrote Ruth Atkinson on 8 February 1945, ‘Both Mr Huxley and Mr Fisher … would like you to include the crescent which appears behind the bird’s eye. This I understand will turn it into a black headed gull, which they think very suitable.’

      The design allowed the artists to create interesting watery effects, with flying gulls reflected in the ripples as flickers of white. The jacket is beautifully printed in soft browns and greys, with the only bright colour, red, reserved for the bird’s bill, legs and eye; it also gave the artists a sufficiently deep tone for the title band. C&RE repeated this trick the following year with Natural History in the Highlands and Islands. Unfortunately some of the subtlety of the design is lost once the jacket’s spine becomes faded. Our image, taken from a proof jacket, is a reminder of what it was like originally.

      The colour range of most of these 1940s designs is deliberately limited. In today’s stores they might have a retro appeal, but in the austerity bookshops of postwar Britain they attracted the buyer’s eye; at least 20,000 copies of London’s Natural History were sold in 1945. Like the books themselves, these jackets were eyecatching, contemporary and rather daring.

       4 Britain’s Structure & Scenery L. Dudley Stamp, 1946

      Britain’s Structure and Scenery – or, as per the title band, ‘BRITAIN’S Structure & Scenery’ – is Dudley Stamp’s account of the physical structure of the British Isles. His working title, The Build and Building of the British Isles, provides a better sense of the book’s main themes: the rocks that underlie and shape the land, and the way mankind has subsequently moulded the landscape. Dashed off in the textbook style in