Читать книгу Art of the New Naturalists: A Complete History - Peter Marren - Страница 18

The anonymous designer of the jacket of London’s Birds, 1949, by the same author, borrowed C&RE’s idea of juxtaposing seagulls and the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.

The first design for London’s Natural History (originally titled Natural History of London), completed by October 1944, featured ducks on a pond. William Collins liked it and preferred it to the Butterflies jacket (at the time he had said of the latter, ‘nothing could be more lovely’; evidently it could). Soon afterwards C&RE produced a new version, keeping the idea of reflections in water, but substituting a livelier bird: a gull. The duck lived on inside the oval on the spine on the NN logo.

London’s Natural History needed an image that said, clearly and unambiguously: London. C&RE found it in the dome of St Paul’s, an icon of the City’s suffering during the Blitz, only four years previously. But instead of the actual dome they showed its reflection in water, possibly just a puddle, possibly the River Thames (bombing and house clearance would just about have made that possible in 1945). Everyone liked the design, but, wrote Ruth Atkinson on 8 February 1945, ‘Both Mr Huxley and Mr Fisher … would like you to include the crescent which appears behind the bird’s eye. This I understand will turn it into a black headed gull, which they think very suitable.’

The design allowed the artists to create interesting watery effects, with flying gulls reflected in the ripples as flickers of white. The jacket is beautifully printed in soft browns and greys, with the only bright colour, red, reserved for the bird’s bill, legs and eye; it also gave the artists a sufficiently deep tone for the title band. C&RE repeated this trick the following year with Natural History in the Highlands and Islands. Unfortunately some of the subtlety of the design is lost once the jacket’s spine becomes faded. Our image, taken from a proof jacket, is a reminder of what it was like originally.

The colour range of most of these 1940s designs is deliberately limited. In today’s stores they might have a retro appeal, but in the austerity bookshops of postwar Britain they attracted the buyer’s eye; at least 20,000 copies of London’s Natural History were sold in 1945. Like the books themselves, these jackets were eyecatching, contemporary and rather daring.