The topic for March 2021 was Typeface, Fonts, and Lettering. Due to some technical difficulties during the online meeting, the group continued the subject during the April meeting and added Dust Jacket and Book Cover Design for the April topic. These topics worked well together as typography often plays a role in dust jacket and cover design.
Typography
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| The Ship that Sailed to Mars |
Timlin, William M. The Ship that Sailed to Mars: A Fantasy. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1923. Architect and artist William Timlin wrote and illustrated the fantasy story of an old man who sails to Mars on a ship he designed himself as he had told it to his son. The first publisher he approached, George G. Harrap and Company, was enchanted not only by the story but also with Timlin's elegant handwritten manuscript and agreed to publish it on the spot. The book was published exactly as it was presented to them, with Timlin's alternating water-color images and hand-lettered text.
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| Text and image from The Ship that Went to Mars |
Harrap & Co. printed only 2000 copies of The Ship that Sailed to Mars, of which 250 numbered copies were prepared for distribution in America under the Frederick Stokes imprint. The Dictionary of 20th Century British Book Illustrators describes it as "the most original and beautiful children's book of the 1920s." The story has been reproduced several times, usually in fine bindings or limited editions, while copies of the original Stokes edition remain scarce on the collectors' market.
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| The Honorary Consul |
Greene, Graham. The Honorary Consul. London: The Bodley Head, 1973. First edition. Dust jacket design by Michael Harvey. This copy is signed by Michael Harvey on the front flap of the dust jacket.
Michael Harvey was a typographer, letter artist, and type
designer. For 25 years, from the late
1960s to the early 1990s, he designed dust jackets for several English
publishers. In that time, he designed and
hand-lettered approximately 1500 jackets, including 12 Graham Greene books from
1971 to 1990, using a different font for each title. Shortly after Greene's death in 1991, Harvey
was commissioned by Nicholas Dennys, Greene's nephew, to design a "From
the Library of Graham Greene" bookplate to go into the books in Greene's
library which were bound for auction.
Harvey created the bookplate, but it was not used for two reasons. First, Greene wrote heavily in the blank end
papers and preliminary pages of his books, and there was no standard location
to adhere a bookplate which did not cover his handwritten notes. Second, Greene's library never went to
auction; the entire collection was acquired by Boston University's library, so
the bookplates were not needed. Harvey's
bookplate design was used instead to illustrate the cover of From the
Library of Graham Greene, an essay on Greene's library by the woman who
catalogued it for auction, with a selection of the manuscript annotations of Graham
Greene discovered in the books.
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| From the Library of Graham Greene |
McNeil,
Jean. From the Library of Graham
Greene. London: The Gloucester Road
Bookshop, 1993. Limited edition of
500 copies. This copy was Michael
Harvey's copy, bearing a presentation inscription from Nicholas Dennys thanking
him for the design of the bookplate, now used for the cover of this book:
To Michael in thanks
for your design of
Graham's beautiful
bookplate and with
very good wishes
Nick 31 March 1993
Book Cover Design
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| From the Earth to the Moon |
Verne, Jules. From the Earth to the Moon: Direct in Ninety-Seven Hours and Twenty Minutes: And a Trip Round It. New York: Scriber, Armstrong & Company, 1874. Translated from the French by Louis Mercier and Eleanor E. King. With eighty full page illustrations. This edition bears a striking book cover design of gilt on red boards with a depiction of the projectile shooting toward the moon. Other early editions used different color schemes of the same image, but the iconic red cover strongly evokes the ethos of the story.
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| An Antarctic Mystery |
Verne, Jules. An Antarctic Mystery. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1899. Translated from the French by Mrs. [Frances] Cashel Hoey. Illustrated. The blue, white, and silver book cover conjures the frigid atmosphere of the sub-Antarctic setting of Verne's response to Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
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| Saurus |
Phillpotts, Eden. Saurus. London: John Murray, 1938. Phillpotts, a prolific author, dramatist, and poet, began writing fantasy and science fiction later in his career, including Saurus about an alien reptilian observing human life on Earth. Phillpotts wondered how our customs and culture might be interpreted by outsiders. He described the story, "If Earth were to receive a visitor from another world, that visitor might not particularly resemble mankind, and might find our customs curious." D. W. Rees's dust jacket whimsically yet eerily illustrates Phillpotts's notion.
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| Brideshead Revisited |
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. Boston: Little Brown, and Company. 1945. First US edition. Waugh's masterpiece follows the romantic life of its main character from the 1920s to the early 1940s and explores the theme of nostalgia for the age of English aristocracy. The dust jacket drawing by Lester M. Peterson depicts the "glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire."
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| Something Wicked This Way Comes |
Bradbury, Ray. Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962. The dust jacket art by American artist Gray Foy sets the mood for Bradbury's dark fantasy which analyses the conflicting natures of good and evil which exist within all individuals. Most known for his figurative Surrealist paintings, Foy supplemented his income by designing and illustrating magazine features and book jackets. His two most recognizable dust jackets are for the first editions of J. R. Salamanca's Lilith (1961) and Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).
