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

      HOW THE JACKETS WERE PRODUCED

      There is no written record of the exact process in which the first New Naturalist jackets were printed, and there are unlikely to be any living witnesses to remember. We know, however, that they were printed by Baynard Press in London and by offset lithography. Further clues survive among the correspondence, which, though as it survives is one-sided and often cryptic, reveals at least that the method was based on photography. Using their great experience of the lithographic medium, C&RE always did their level best to make life as easy as possible for the printer.

      Lithography is a method of printing from a flat surface. The name comes from Greek words meaning ‘stone-writing’, for lithographic prints traditionally used a flat stone surface to transfer the image from artwork to paper. The artist drew with a crayon on a slab of carefully prepared limestone. After the drawing has been prepared, prints are taken from it by dampening the stone and charging it with greasy printing ink. The technique is based on the principle that oil and water do not mix. From the early years of the 20th century the process was mechanised by the ‘flat-bed offset machine’, in which the paper received the print from an intermediary process, a smooth rubber roller. Offset printing prepared the ground for the flowering of poster art in which graphic designs from serious artists appeared in the hallways of railway stations and London Underground, and on advertisement hoardings originally intended to hide unsightly development.

      The advantage of lithography is that it enables the artist’s work to be reproduced in limitless numbers without any alteration of the original design. Among the outstanding printers and proponents of colour lithography were Curwen Press and Baynard Press, both of which had close links with the London art schools and printed posters by contemporary artists, including Clifford and Rosemary Ellis. From 1935, Baynard Press employed one of the best-known craftsman-printers of the day, Thomas Edgar Griffits (1883–1957), known as ‘the Indefatigable Griffits’, who shared the secrets of his craft in two mainstream books, The Technique of Colour Printing by Lithography (1948) and The Rudiments of Lithography (1956). Griffits was a skilled interpreter or ‘translator’ of other artists’ work. He was also something of a lithographic missionary.

      Once Collins had decided to use the Ellis designs, the question was where to print them. During October 1944, Ruth Atkinson costed the alternatives of photogravure or lithography before deciding on the latter. She met Thomas Griffits, who advised her that the most cost-effective way of printing the jackets would be ‘photo-litho with a deep etch for the line’, and for the prints to be made on rough paper (presumably using matt printing inks). He was also ‘most decided about the fewer colours the better’. Hence Clifford and Rosemary designed most of their New Naturalist jackets as ‘camera-ready artwork’ in four colours or fewer, relying on tones and overlaps to tease out more colours. Finally, Griffits advised that they produce artwork at exactly the same size of the printed jacket, for otherwise ‘a great deal of the subtlety of detail’ would be lost (remarks conveyed to C&RE by Ruth Atkinson, undated but late 1944).

      Colour sketch for the jacket of the unpublished Ponds, Pools and Puddles by C&RE, mid-1970s. This title, also known as Ponds, Pools and Protozoa, was to have been Sir Alister Hardy’s third contribution to the series, after the two Open Sea books. By complete contrast with the vast expanses of ocean, this book would be devoted to ‘the microscopic life of the little waters’. Hardy approved the colour sketch, although he had reservations about the much-magnified organisms shown beneath the surface of the pond. Unfortunately, Hardy never found time to complete the book, though it remained a desired title and is now slowly heading towards publication.

      It may seem surprising that the House of Collins, which was a printer as well as a publisher, did not decide to print the jackets in-house. The probable reason is that C&RE’s designs were closer to an art print than most book jacket designs, and that this required the skills of experienced art printers. Clifford no doubt convinced Ruth Atkinson that their work needed an experienced ‘translator’. The Ellis designs required exact colours printed in the right order, and the characteristically fuzzy outline of their colours needed an experienced interpreter.

      The printer normally worked from the three primary colours, plus black. Mixing these was a craft in itself. For example, wrote Thomas Griffits in 1956, ‘by adding a little orange, green or violet to any of the primaries a less harsh and more pleasant hue is obtained.’ Darkening a colour with black was to be avoided as it detracted from its luminosity. Lighter colours were obtained not by mixing in white but by stippling the plate or adding chalk. Further colours could be obtained by overprinting, but it was important to print these in the correct order. For example, green printed on top of violet could produce (unlikely as it might sound) an attractive pale grey, while printing violet on top of green might achieve nothing but a muddier shade of violet. Certain colours go well together and enhance one another, while others, like green-blue next to blue, have the reverse effect.

      For each jacket C&RE made a full colour design using water-based paint: mainly gouache but sometimes with additional watercolours, and incorporating the white of the paper. With the design came instructions pencilled underneath for the exact colours, and the order in which they should be printed. They prepared separate artwork for the series colophon and the title lettering. On most of the books published in the 1940s, the title and name of the author was hand-lettered on the title band, while for nearly every title up to No. 24 (Flowers of the Coast) the colophon was individualised with a symbol of the book’s contents. Several jackets were produced by different techniques during a brief period of experimentation in 1950–1. From 1970, the jackets were produced by a completely different method.

      In some cases the original artwork of the New Naturalist jackets has survived (and is reproduced for the first time in this book). Some retain registration marks which indicate that the artwork was photographed by a special plate camera. Each colour would be separated by the blockmaker as ‘film positives’ and then transferred on to a lithographic plate. A comparison between the surviving Ellis artwork and the printed jacket shows how faithful the results could be in the hands of experienced operators.

      Colour separations for Ponds, Pools and Puddles.

      Tricky jackets: cost-cutting experiments were made over the printing of Wild Flowers of Chalk & Limestone and Birds & Men in 1950–51.

      Jackets that were to be printed by the thousand in a single production run required power presses. By 1945, automatically fed printing machines could run at high speeds ranging from 2,500 to 5,000 impressions per hour. All but one of the first 15 New Naturalist jackets were printed by Baynard Press (the exception was The Art of Botanical Illustration which was probably done in-house). The colours of these jackets are wonderfully harmonious, with subtle, pleasing tones quite unlike the brighter but harsher ‘Pantone’ inks of the 1970s. Six proof copies of each jacket were normally made, one of which was sent to the artists for their approval, while another was circulated at New Naturalist Board meetings.

      By 1950, however, Collins was looking elsewhere to print the jackets. The costs of book production, and colour printing in particular, had soared while sales were falling. Furthermore, Collins’s alliance with Adprint had come to a premature end in 1950 when the latter found the series ‘no longer an economic proposition’. The Collins printing factory in Glasgow was clamouring to do the job. The then editor, Raleigh Trevelyan, was minded to try it out for the next jacket, Wild Flowers of Chalk & Limestone. It would require changes in the way the jackets were prepared, and opened the way to a period of unsuccessful experimentation. The results were at first lamentable. The printers could not reproduce the colours accurately enough without using screens that diminished their impact. The artists thereupon drew the design afresh as colour separations on plastic transparencies, and, when that did not work either, directly on to the printing plate.