Our flagship digital exhibition traces the history of book cover design throughout the 20th century with examples drawn from The Leeds Library's own collection. Focusing particularly on why publishers might choose to employ an illustrated cover, or one that is purely typographic, this exhibition also looks at some of the social and cultural history that has influenced book production over the last century.
Pre 1900
The first book jackets or ‘dust wrappers’ were used solely for the purpose of protecting the book and were usually plain and discarded immediately upon purchase. Decoration was usually reserved for the leather or cloth binding and consisted of embossed gold illustrations and lettering. In 2009 a librarian at the Bodleian Library in Oxford discovered a printed paper binding from a book called Friendship’s Offering from 1830, and this is now widely considered to be the earliest surviving example of a designed and printed book cover. It took another 90 years for the designed book jacket to become common place, as the advent of colour printing in the second half of the 19th Century meant book covers themselves were now the canvas on which illustrators could print their designs. Printing directly onto fabric was an expensive process, however, and it was for economic reasons following the First World War that cover printing finally migrated on to paper jackets, and the book cover as we know it became the dominant form.
Image: Green, S.G. (1883) Scottish pictures drawn with pen and pencil. London: Religious Tract Society.
Illustrated covers
Illustrated book covers were in their heyday for a fifty-year period between 1920 and 1970, when interwar booksellers began to realise the commerciality of bold, pictorial designs on front covers. Towards the end of the 1970s, photography – a new and exciting commercial medium – began to take centre stage. During this time working artists and illustrators were employed to create book covers though almost none kept it up as their sole practice and would often take on a variety of design work alongside jacket illustration. This meant that while book covers of this period generally followed the graphic design trends of the day, artists' individual styles were also allowed to shine. These decades produced some of the most iconic and instantly recognisable book covers, from Vanessa Bell’s designs for the Hogarth Press to Tove Jansson’s Moomin series for which she also illustrated the covers.
Due to the Library’s policy of discarding book jackets, few survive here from this period. Many that do are from the Library’s Archive.
Kenneth Rowntree (1915 – 1997)
Kenneth Rowntree was born in Scarborough, the son of a department store owner. He studied drawing at The Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford followed by the Slade School of Art. During the war he was commissioned by Kenneth Clark to contribute drawings of landscapes to the Recording Britain Project. This interest in landscape can be seen in his book covers of the 40s and 50s as well as a love of pattern, motif and letter form.
Image: Walmsley, L. (1948) Master Mariner. London: Collins.
Barbara Jones (1912-1978)
Barbara Jones was an artist, muralist, writer and curator who was fascinated by everyday objects and curiosities of popular culture as well as architecture, and she often wrote about and curated exhibitions on these subjects. One of her most influential books, The Unsophisticated Arts (Architectural Press, 1951), examined informal and untrained arts including tattooing and cake decorating. Alongside her other work she also illustrated over 30 book covers for other authors, two of which have been kept in the Library Archives.
Jeff Fisher (1952 -)
Jeff Fisher is an Australian artist and illustrator. Unlike Rowntree and Jones, the majority of Fisher’s work has been book cover design, perhaps reflecting the increasingly established illustrative tradition as well as the growing popularity of the pictorial paper jacket. After studying Fine Art, Film and Animation in Australia in the 70s, Fisher moved briefly to London before settling in France in the 90s. Today his delicate hand drawn designs often stick out amongst the bold computer-generated graphics that adorn the covers of many contemporary books.
Images left to right: Camilleri, A. (2013) The dance of the seagull. London: Mantle. Camilleri, A. (2015) Blade of light. London: Mantle Camilleri, A. (2006) Excursion to Tindari. London: Picador.
House Style
Penguin
Perhaps the most famous of all house styles is the Penguin paperback. More often seen now on postcards, mugs and tote bags, the original black, white and orange covers of the penguin fiction series have proved a durable and iconic mainstay of British book culture. The original covers were designed in 1935 by Edward Young, a designer at the publishing company The Bodley Head and were inspired by the design of Albatross books, a European publishing house founded in 1932. Albatross covers were the first to colour code books according to type, a practice Penguin adopted to great effect, alongside the classic black and white bird logo.
The runaway success of Penguin paperbacks heralded a revolution in cheap paperback publishing that had started with an increase in rail travel during the 19th century. Allen Lane (1902-1970) founded Penguin as a response to the rapidly failing finances of The Bodley Head, a publishing company he had worked at since he was seventeen. The first run of 10 books was sold in Woolworths for sixpence each and were a runaway success. In 1939 the American paperback revolution began with cheap books printed with an array of gaudy eye-catching cover designs. Penguin however refused to adopt pictorial cover design and under the designer Jan Tschichold from 1946 Penguin cemented themselves as one of the most recognisable brands of the 20th century.
Penguin colour coded its books according to genre, most famously orange for fiction. Green was for crime, dark blue for biographies, cherry for travel and adventure, and red was for theatre.
During the Second World War a demand for cheap books on contemporary issues led to Penguin establishing the Pelican book imprint for non-fiction which was aimed at students and those interested in learning.
Image left to right: Allingham, M. (1950) Take two at bedtime Allingham, M. (1934) Death of a ghost. Middlesex, England: Penguin.
Gollancz
The instantly recognisable yellow covers of Gollancz books were born out of a collaboration between Victor Gollancz (1893- 1967) and Stanley Morison (1889-1967) a typographer, printing executive and historian of printing who designed the Times New Roman font among many others. Gollancz set up his own publishing firm in 1928 and employed Morison in 1930.
Yellow was already known in France and Italy as a colour for cheap and cheerful novels. More serious French publishing tended to use a patriotic combination of red, white and blue or black, although until the 1930s a yellow wrapper with black letterpress type was ubiquitous. Gollancz however decided on yellow after seeing its effective use as a background colour in the railway stations of London.
Typographic covers
While text-only covers may be a relatively rare sight on today’s bookshelves they were once the norm, particularly in Europe. In 1911 the Parisian publishing company Gallimard employed a Belgian printer, Verbeke, who created the layout the publisher still uses for their Collection Blanche series to this day: black text on an ivory background with a red and black border.
Text-only covers sell a book on the strength of the publisher’s reputation and as such are often employed by houses with a focus on classical, high-quality literature. In part Penguin's initial success was due to its policy of reprinting classic works of fiction, making them available at low cost. Its restrained and uniform style allowed them to shake off the association of the paperback with literature of poor quality. Gollancz’s eccentric use of font on the other hand earnt them a reputation as slightly more dramatic.
Text-only covers had fallen somewhat out of fashion in the 80s and 90s but were revived by the sudden rise graffiti in cities like New York.
Faber & Faber
Another example of a typographer’s style forging a visual identity for a publishing company are the Faber book covers of the 60s and 70s. In 1941 Faber hired Berthold Wolpe (1905 –1989), a German Jewish typographer, calligrapher and type designer. Wolpe had designed the typeface Albertus for Monotype in 1932 whilst he was travelling to the UK and trying to get a work permit in order to escape the growing threat from the Nazi party in Germany. In 1941 after several imprisonments, he was granted permission to stay in the UK for the next 35 years he worked for Faber designing over 1500 book covers.
Unlike the printed text covers of Penguin and Gollancz, Wolpe designed all his book covers by hand giving each its own character but tying them all together with his own personal style, a style that until the 1980s was indistinguishable from Faber’s own.
The Library was in the habit of throwing away dust wrappers and book jackets until at least the 1970s. These Library editions are rare in that they still have their covers intact – perhaps a testament to the power of their design
When design company A2/SW/HK were commissioned to design the covers for a reprint of Samuel Beckett's works they looked to Wolpe’s spare and bold type focused design for inspiration and designed a new font, Beckett, for the series.
Image: Heaney, S. (no date) Door into the Dark. Faber & Faber
In recent years text-only covers have become increasingly popular following the ever-swinging pendulum on the maximalism-minimalism spectrum. Jacques Testard, who founded Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2014 said of their minimalist cover design:
“The idea was to let the text speak for itself. We hoped to create loyalty through the brand, so that eventually readers might see the Fitzcarraldo Editions design as a guarantee of high literary quality. And we wanted to stand out on the shelves of bookshops in the UK, where most publishers have images on their covers.”
Fitzcarraldo Editions' covers were designed by Artistic Director and designer Ray O’Meara who created a custom typeface for the publisher and placed the sparse text on a background of Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue. Many other small, independent presses have also opted for a uniform and minimalist text only design. Galley Beggar Press have a set font and layout to all their books, though like Penguin and Faber they also vary the colour for each text. Fitzcarraldo Editions and Galley Beggar are both small indie presses with big reputations, and their books are instantly recognisable through their uniform covers.
Photographic covers
The success of Penguin saw several other publishers establish trade paperback imprints and the 60s saw a revolution in paperback publishing. With the market suddenly flooded, publishers needed new and exciting covers to distinguish themselves. Penguin hired a new Art Director, Germano Facetti, and began to publish titles with covers designed by freelance graphic designers. Photography was the perfect medium for this new look, with many paperback designs inspired by TV and Cinema and created by young graphic designers keen to try out new ideas. The newly accessible realism of photography freed other graphic elements to move towards the abstract and the 70s saw the advent of psychedelia as a graphic style which inevitably made its way onto the book covers of the decade.
Because of the Library’s policy of primarily collecting hardbacks, it is not easy to track down an example of a 60s paperback. However, these two Margery Allingham Penguin paperbacks from the 60s illustrate the new move towards both abstraction and photography.
Len Deighton (1929 -present) began his career as a graphic designer after studying at the Royal College of Art. Deighton began writing a new type of spy story in the 60s which would go on to be hugely popular. The graphic design for his books was done by his friend Raymond Hawkley with whom he went to college and who also became a writer of thrillers in the 70s.
There is a lot more to say about book cover design after the 90s. With the advent of digital graphic design and the widespread conglomeration of publishing companies, designers became torn between the pressures of commerciality and new frontiers of design enabled by digital innovation.
Bibliography
Powers, A. (2001) Front covers : great book jackets and cover design. London: Mitchell Beazley.
Salisbury, M. (2017) The illustrated dust jacket 1920-1970. London: Thames & Hudson.
Dawood, S., 2022. Delving into the life of Berthold Wolpe: the German Jewish designer who fled the Nazis. [online] Design Week. Available at: <https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/19-25-march-2018/delving-life-berthold-wolpe-german-jewish-designer-fled-nazis/> [Accessed 7 July 2022].
Encyclopedia Britannica. 2022. history of publishing - The paperback revolution. [online] Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/topic/publishing/The-paperback-revolution> [Accessed 7 July 2022].
Eye Magazine. 2022. Eye Magazine | Feature | Naked words. [online] Available at: <https://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/naked-words> [Accessed 7 July 2022].
graphéine, T., 2022. A short history of book covers - 3/4. [online] Graphéine - Agence de communication Paris Lyon. Available at: <https://www.grapheine.com/en/history-of-graphic-design/history-of-book-covers-3> [Accessed 7 July 2022].
The Face. 2022. How Fitzcarraldo Editions made the most beautiful books on the shelf. [online] Available at: <https://theface.com/culture/fitzcarraldo-editions-books-nobel-prize-interview-jacques-testard> [Accessed 7 July 2022].
With thanks to...
Exhibition: Molly Magrath
Digital: Molly Magrath