Читать книгу Mexico Set - Len Deighton - Страница 2

Some years ago I attended a design congress in Oaxaca, Mexico, where for a few pesos I purchased some wonderful papier mâché masks, my favourite being the umbrella salesmen, a moustachioed gentleman with a gold tooth. This image seemed to fit perfectly as a matching half to Len Deighton’s protagonist Bernard Samson’s face in Mexico Set. This two-faced quality seemed, to me, to speak volumes for the nature of the business that Bernard is in, and also to the conflicted nature of his character.

Some time later I was invited to speak at a design conference in Queretaro, Mexico. To my delight the event took place during the festival of ‘Día de los Muertos’, ‘The Day of the Dead’, during which time many wonderful related artefacts are sold. One of these items comes from the folk art of ‘papel picado’, the brightly coloured tissue paper-cuts. I thought that the image of a skeleton reading a book would be a most appropriate illustration for this book’s back cover.

At the heart of every one of the nine books in this triple trilogy is Bernard Samson, so I wanted to come up with a neat way of visually linking them all. When the reader has collected all nine books and displays them together in sequential order, the books’ spines will spell out Samson’s name in the form of a blackmail note made up of airline baggage tags. The tags were drawn from my personal collection, and are colourful testimony to thousands of air miles spent travelling the world.

Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI