Читать книгу Spy Line - Len Deighton - Страница 5

The deceptively simple titles of the Bernard Samson series still yielded a wealth of possibilities with regard to how they might be illustrated. This second book of the middle trilogy was no different, suggesting lines of authority, responsibility, accountability, relationships both open and hidden. After much consideration, I eventually incorporated the concept in a more visual way. For the cover of Spy Line I replaced the photograph on my Russian visa with that of Bernard Samson’s and then ran it through our studio paper shredder to emphasize the notion of lines, particularly lines of destruction, as if Bernard’s identity is being struck through, erased.

The vignette on the back cover features a doctored photograph of one of my old passports, an Eastern Bloc immigration officer’s rubber stamp plus a Russian pack of cigarettes. The attentive reader will clearly be alerted to the fact that travel plays a significant role in the story, though to what ends only the following pages will reveal.

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