Art of the New Naturalists: A Complete History

5 The jackets showed ‘forms of nature’ interpreted by sympathetic and knowledgeable artists that gave them vitality and inner life. They were intended to intrigue. They were not intended to shock, but perhaps, especially at first, they did.

WINNING ROUND THE SCIENTISTS

My book, The New Naturalists, describes in some detail how William Collins conceived this ground-breaking series of nature books, and the board of celebrity scientists which he set up to commission books and oversee their production. The committee was headed by Julian Huxley, perhaps then Britain’s best-known biologist, but the key personality on it was his energetic protégé, James Fisher. The young Fisher was full of fire about the advance of natural history in postwar Britain; he was in great demand for natural history radio programmes in the 1940s and ‘50s. He, perhaps more than the others, was convinced of the potential mass appeal of illustrated books on natural history and their importance in promoting interest in birds and other wildlife. He was later to become a great influence on natural history publishing, not least as a senior advisor and book commissioner for Collins.

The idea of fancy jackets for the New Naturalist books appears to have originated in the mind of Ruth Atkinson, who joined the firm in 1943 and soon became a trusted advisor to the chairman, William (‘Billy’) Collins. During the 1930s she had worked as a book editor for Jonathan Cape where, among other things, she commissioned artists to design jackets. Clifford and Rosemary Ellis had been among her clients; she had been impressed by their work and, it seems, had already got to know them well. On 20 July 1944, Ruth wrote to the Ellises to tell them about the forthcoming series and ask whether they now felt ‘at all inclined to do book jackets’. The new books would have ‘a great many illustrations’, she went on, ‘and I thought that you would do lovely jackets for them.’ But, she warned, ‘there are a great many people whom the jacket must please: besides Mr Collins, the editorial committee of this series and the producers of it, Messrs Adprint.’ She invited them to ‘work out a rough, for say the first title’, and hoped to be able to discuss it further with them (RA to C&RE, 20.7.44).

The Ellises’ response was to invite her to Bath for the weekend where, during a ‘deliciously comfortable and peaceful stay’, Ruth persuaded C&RE to try out a colour sketch for the jacket of Butterflies by E.B. Ford. As was to become the rule, she sent them some material and ‘pulls’ of plates from the book to provide an idea of its nature and contents. By September 1944, the artists had produced an arresting design based on the Swallowtail butterfly and its caterpillar, drawn at twice the size of the printed jacket. At the same time they had also, presumably at Ruth Atkinson’s request, produced alternative jacket designs, two of which incorporated a small photograph. Ruth especially liked those, but Billy Collins preferred the Swallowtail. (RA to C &RE, 18.9.44: ‘he likes the two without the photographs best–I like those with the photographs’). She added that Collins had liked the Ellises’ work ‘better than anything else which has been submitted’. Another artist had also been working on the New Naturalist jackets, ‘but he has had to give it up’ (RA to C&RE, 8.9.44); who that artist was we have been unable to discover.

Jacket design, front and back cover, by C&RE for the King Penguin series, printed in four colours and published in 1946.

Billy Collins had indeed liked the design. It is a fair guess that he had looked for an original and arresting style of jacket from the start and had given his blessing to Ruth’s apparently solo venture. Collins saw the job of the jackets to sell books, and hence they were his responsibility and not that of the New Naturalist Board, whose purpose was, rather, to achieve high and consistent scientific standards for the series. He ignored (though tactfully) the Board’s strongly expressed preference for photographic jackets, and invited the Ellises to design jackets for the first six books. They were offered 12 guineas per jacket and three guineas extra for the specially designed colophon. Their fees later rose more or less in line with inflation, but were always modest.

The original colophon for the New Naturalist library, designed by c&re in 1944.

The decision, therefore, to commission C&RE was made by Billy Collins alone and in the teeth of opposition. The (newly discovered) Board minutes grumpily note that ‘it had been agreed that Messrs Collins, knowing the Editors’ views on the subject, would be entirely responsible for the production of the Wrapper’ (NN Board, 9.9.45). ‘It really is a question of pleasing Mr Collins’, Ruth Atkinson had told the Ellises, ‘and not the naturalists’ (RA to C?, 17.10.44).

The Board might have had a stronger case for a photographic jacket if they had some strong photographs to show. But in 1945, good colour photographs of wildlife in natural surroundings were still rare; nearly all the colour photographs in the first New Naturalist titles had to be commissioned specially with Adprint’s precious stocks of American Kodak. Butterflies included some ground-breaking shots of live butterflies taken in colour by Sam Beaufoy, but even so it is hard to find even one that would make a satisfactory book jacket.

Early in 1945, James Fisher had been deputised by the Board to visit Clifford and Rosemary in Bath to find out more about their ideas and techniques. ‘I hope you get on well with Fisher and win him over to the idea of non-photographic jackets which will be a major achievement’, wrote Ruth to Clifford, perhaps a little nervously (RA to C ?, 22.1.45). Fisher, it seems, was indeed won over, but other members of the Board, especially Julian Huxley, Eric Hosking and John Gilmour, were not, at least not at first. Hosking, in particular, felt that the credo of the series, and its unique selling point of specially taken colour photographs, demanded a photographic jacket. After viewing the first few jackets, seemingly with tight lips, the Board gradually grew to admire them, and, by 1948, they were all full of praise for that of The Badger.

For the time being, however, when advance copies of the first two New Naturalists lay on the table before them (with photographers invited in to record the occasion), this is all the minutes have to say about it: ‘Dr Huxley said he still did not like the idea of non-photographic wrappers but as he understood that it was impossible to change now, would it be possible for future volumes to try out some other artist as well?’ Eric Hosking suggested Jack Armitage as a possible alternative. John Gilmour asked that in future the editors, if not the authors, be shown the jacket designs before the books were printed, which Collins agreed to. He [i.e. Collins] added that ‘he was quite willing later on to try out some other artist but that no series of wrappers which Collins had produced had ever been so successful as these with booksellers and others, and that he was of the opinion that the artists who are designing them were first class and great experts’ (NN Board meeting, 15.11.45).

That was the end of the matter. The channel of communication between artist and publishers lay not with the Board but almost entirely with Collins and his editors, first Ruth Atkinson and later Raleigh Trevelyan, Jean Whitcombe, Patricia (‘Patsy’) Cohen, Michael Walter, Libby Hoseason and Robert MacDonald. Billy Collins, one suspects, had no intention of ‘trying out’ any other artist, whatever he might have said to Huxley. He had ‘for more than thirty years been unfailing in his generous and kind encouragement to us’, wrote Clifford and Rosemary after Collins’ death in 1976. ‘To us it was an ideal patron and artist relationship’ (C&RE to Lady Collins, 22.9.76).

The Ellises were commissioned to design jackets for the first six books and then another six, after which their commission became open-ended. The artists admired the series and felt committed to it. Despite a few hiccups along the way, most notably when the standard of printing fell in the early 1950s, they enjoyed the work. Including the monographs, C&RE produced 86 jacket designs over 40 years, plus many more for books that, for one reason or another, never reached publication stage. After Clifford’s death, Rosemary recalled how designing the jackets made ‘such a refreshing change to the problems of running an academy. The manuscript and the wherewithal for doing a jacket often came on holiday with us and I have happy memories of sitting outside a tent with Clifford in some remote part of Europe working on the designs’ (RE to Crispin Fisher, 1985).

It is surely Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, as much as anyone, who established the ‘brand image’ of the New Naturalist series, and helped to make it the most long-running, and latterly also the most collectable, library of books in the natural history world. In return, the books have kept the work of C&RE alive and made their images some of the most eye-catching and distinctive in modern publishing.

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.

After yet more trouble finding alternative ways of printing the jacket of Birds & Men, Clifford dropped a strong hint that they were getting fed up with the whole business. Billy Collins wisely stepped in and instructed the editor to print the jacket in the usual way. Even so, the artists were asked to try again with colour separations for The Greenshank and An Angler’s Entomology, in the first case using only two colours. From 1951, the blocks for the jackets were no longer prepared by Baynard Press but by Odhams Ltd, a Watford-based ‘gravure printing house’ which owned modern offset presses. The blocks were then sent to the Collins factory for printing. The method now relied on what the correspondence refers to as the ‘line method’. At first it was what Clifford called ‘a flukey business’ (cE, 12.1.52) resulting in harsh gradations with ‘everything very sharp and black’ (the jacket of The Greenshank being the worst example). Nor could the new printers match Baynard Press’s skill in mixing and matching colours. The jacket of Flowers of the Coast was a dismal failure, while the artwork of The Sea Coast and The Weald was tampered with and ‘mutilated’ by the blockmakers.

The standard of printing soon began to improve, and there are fewer problems on record from the mid-1950s onwards, though the fine touch and delicacy of colour that marked the earlier jackets is lacking. More problems surfaced in the 1960s, when the gap between the artists’ intentions and the printer’s capacity to meet them seemed to widen again. On the Nature Conservation jacket, for example, the printers seem to have given up and used a coarse screen for the overlaps, while for Grass and Grasslands they printed the colours in the wrong order.

Good and bad solutions: The jacket of Nature Conservation in Britain was printed with the help of a colour-deadening screen, while Man & Birds was the first jacket to benefit from combining sets of colour separations.

Dissatisfaction with these jackets led to a major overhaul in the way the jackets were produced and printed. By now the artist could indicate the exact tone or shade required by reference to a ‘Pantone’ number. The Ellises decided that better results could be obtained by using ‘colour separations’ since these enabled the printers to reproduce the artwork with greater precision, and allowed the artists greater freedom to create bold and colourful designs. It involved them in the difficult task of producing a jacket which would be seen only after it was proofed (Clifford memorably compared it with reading the musical score of a quartet). Fortunately C&RE were experienced hands at such ‘reading’, in which four sets of brushwork in black paint on white watercolour paper would in due course become a well-realised colour jacket. By 1970, this craft-based method was a rarity in the field of commercial art. Michael Walter, the experienced Collins editor of the time, said that the Ellis hand-brushed artwork separations were the only non-mechanical colour separations (apart from maps) he had ever seen.

Brighter and more transparent printing inks meant brighter, more luminous jackets and allowed the artists to adopt a looser style in which dry brushwork produced the characteristic fuzzy-edged colour masses of what one might call the Ellis’s late period. To help the printers, and also allow the Collins editor to get at least an idea of how the printed jacket should look, they also provided a colour sketch (which was in some cases a close match to the printed jacket). The new method of production by colour separations continued until the last Ellis jacket, The Natural History of Orkney.

When Robert Gillmor came to design the jackets in 1985, he used a similar technique, though drawing the colour separations on sheets of clear plastic instead of watercolour paper. From 1986, the jackets were printed by the offset machines of Radavion Press in Reading, sufficiently close to his workplace for Gillmor to be present at each printing and so able to make any necessary last-minute adjustments and to choose the proof that best matched his conception. After Robert Gillmor moved to Norfolk in 1998, the jackets were printed in much the same way (and with Robert looking on) by the Norwich-based Saxon Photolitho Ltd until 2004 when the jackets began to be printed overseas. Over time, Robert has varied his technique, using linocuts more and more to add vitality to the designs (Gillmor, 2006). These changes are discussed in the main text under the appropriate jacket.

FROM BUTTERFLIES TO ORKNEY (#ulink_e39de837-f48d-529b-bcc3-32a4bf650ee9)

The Jackets by Clifford &Rosemary Ellis (#ulink_e39de837-f48d-529b-bcc3-32a4bf650ee9)

1 ButterfliesE. B. Ford, 1945

The dust jacket of Butterflies must be one of the best-known images in the world of natural history publishing – so familiar in fact that it is hard to recapture how unusual it must have seemed when the book was first put on sale in November 1945. For those used to more conventional book jackets, this design, in which the caterpillar is so much more prominent than the adult butterfly, both conveyed in terms of form and colour rather than strict scientific fidelity, must have raised a few eyebrows. C&RE’s first jacket design certainly helped to underline the ‘new’ in New Naturalist.

The prototype of the Butterflies jacket was a painting of September 1944. Twice the size of the printed jacket, the artists used gouache and watercolour paint on thick, rough-surfaced watercolour paper. At this stage the Ellises probably did not know that they would be restricted to four colours (including black).

Later the design was redrawn to the same size as the printed jacket in response to recommended printing requirements. Completed by January 1945, C&RE made a number of modifications, bringing the butterflies closer and making more of the distant trees and windmill. The blue was deepened to enable the title lettering to show more clearly. Perhaps few readers would have spotted that the orange colour enclosing the book’s number is the caterpillar’s defensive organ, known as an osmeterium.

William Collins had ‘asked a great many people about this jacket. He likes the original rough and the smaller redrawing of it’, Ruth Atkinson went on, ‘but has received a good deal of criticism at your using a Swallow-Tail which is a very rare butterfly in England I am told. He would like you to do the design again, using another butterfly – possibly the Dark Green Fretillary [sic]. Mr Collins hates to ask you to begin all over again but as we are quite definitely not using the design you finally submitted, I think it might be easier to suggest a third alternative for this title’ (RA to CE, 8.2.45).

The first submitted design for Butterflies with hand lettering on watercolour paper by C&RE, 1944. It is drawn half as large again as the printed jacket (37.2 x 31 cm).

Later jackets of Butterflies were printed using a screen to deepen the colours.

For the published jacket the Ellises made the butterflies and distant scene more prominent and redesigned the spine and colophon.

It seems, then, that there were three versions of the jacket design for the first New Naturalist, the original rough, the modified design drawn at jacket size, and a third version with the fritillary that C&RE produced and sent to Collins by February 1945. By then, however, Billy Collins had changed his mind and decided to stick with the Swallowtail design after all. He was now ‘absolutely happy’ about the jacket, and commented that he had personally ‘always liked the Swallow-Tail, and I hope you will do this. I do not think that the criticism of its being rather rare matters,’ he added, ‘and I do not think one could get anything more lovely’ (wc to CE, 16.2.45). ‘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 GameBrian Vesey-Fitzgerald, 1945