Art of the New Naturalists: A Complete History. Peter Marren

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      Tricky jackets: cost-cutting experiments were made over the printing of Wild Flowers of Chalk & Limestone and Birds & Men in 1950–51.

      Jackets that were to be printed by the thousand in a single production run required power presses. By 1945, automatically fed printing machines could run at high speeds ranging from 2,500 to 5,000 impressions per hour. All but one of the first 15 New Naturalist jackets were printed by Baynard Press (the exception was The Art of Botanical Illustration which was probably done in-house). The colours of these jackets are wonderfully harmonious, with subtle, pleasing tones quite unlike the brighter but harsher ‘Pantone’ inks of the 1970s. Six proof copies of each jacket were normally made, one of which was sent to the artists for their approval, while another was circulated at New Naturalist Board meetings.

      By 1950, however, Collins was looking elsewhere to print the jackets. The costs of book production, and colour printing in particular, had soared while sales were falling. Furthermore, Collins’s alliance with Adprint had come to a premature end in 1950 when the latter found the series ‘no longer an economic proposition’. The Collins printing factory in Glasgow was clamouring to do the job. The then editor, Raleigh Trevelyan, was minded to try it out for the next jacket, Wild Flowers of Chalk & Limestone. It would require changes in the way the jackets were prepared, and opened the way to a period of unsuccessful experimentation. The results were at first lamentable. The printers could not reproduce the colours accurately enough without using screens that diminished their impact. The artists thereupon drew the design afresh as colour separations on plastic transparencies, and, when that did not work either, directly on to the printing plate.

      After yet more trouble finding alternative ways of printing the jacket of Birds & Men, Clifford dropped a strong hint that they were getting fed up with the whole business. Billy Collins wisely stepped in and instructed the editor to print the jacket in the usual way. Even so, the artists were asked to try again with colour separations for The Greenshank and An Angler’s Entomology, in the first case using only two colours. From 1951, the blocks for the jackets were no longer prepared by Baynard Press but by Odhams Ltd, a Watford-based ‘gravure printing house’ which owned modern offset presses. The blocks were then sent to the Collins factory for printing. The method now relied on what the correspondence refers to as the ‘line method’. At first it was what Clifford called ‘a flukey business’ (cE, 12.1.52) resulting in harsh gradations with ‘everything very sharp and black’ (the jacket of The Greenshank being the worst example). Nor could the new printers match Baynard Press’s skill in mixing and matching colours. The jacket of Flowers of the Coast was a dismal failure, while the artwork of The Sea Coast and The Weald was tampered with and ‘mutilated’ by the blockmakers.

      The standard of printing soon began to improve, and there are fewer problems on record from the mid-1950s onwards, though the fine touch and delicacy of colour that marked the earlier jackets is lacking. More problems surfaced in the 1960s, when the gap between the artists’ intentions and the printer’s capacity to meet them seemed to widen again. On the Nature Conservation jacket, for example, the printers seem to have given up and used a coarse screen for the overlaps, while for Grass and Grasslands they printed the colours in the wrong order.

      Good and bad solutions: The jacket of Nature Conservation in Britain was printed with the help of a colour-deadening screen, while Man & Birds was the first jacket to benefit from combining sets of colour separations.

      Dissatisfaction with these jackets led to a major overhaul in the way the jackets were produced and printed. By now the artist could indicate the exact tone or shade required by reference to a ‘Pantone’ number. The Ellises decided that better results could be obtained by using ‘colour separations’ since these enabled the printers to reproduce the artwork with greater precision, and allowed the artists greater freedom to create bold and colourful designs. It involved them in the difficult task of producing a jacket which would be seen only after it was proofed (Clifford memorably compared it with reading the musical score of a quartet). Fortunately C&RE were experienced hands at such ‘reading’, in which four sets of brushwork in black paint on white watercolour paper would in due course become a well-realised colour jacket. By 1970, this craft-based method was a rarity in the field of commercial art. Michael Walter, the experienced Collins editor of the time, said that the Ellis hand-brushed artwork separations were the only non-mechanical colour separations (apart from maps) he had ever seen.

      Brighter and more transparent printing inks meant brighter, more luminous jackets and allowed the artists to adopt a looser style in which dry brushwork produced the characteristic fuzzy-edged colour masses of what one might call the Ellis’s late period. To help the printers, and also allow the Collins editor to get at least an idea of how the printed jacket should look, they also provided a colour sketch (which was in some cases a close match to the printed jacket). The new method of production by colour separations continued until the last Ellis jacket, The Natural History of Orkney.

      When Robert Gillmor came to design the jackets in 1985, he used a similar technique, though drawing the colour separations on sheets of clear plastic instead of watercolour paper. From 1986, the jackets were printed by the offset machines of Radavion Press in Reading, sufficiently close to his workplace for Gillmor to be present at each printing and so able to make any necessary last-minute adjustments and to choose the proof that best matched his conception. After Robert Gillmor moved to Norfolk in 1998, the jackets were printed in much the same way (and with Robert looking on) by the Norwich-based Saxon Photolitho Ltd until 2004 when the jackets began to be printed overseas. Over time, Robert has varied his technique, using linocuts more and more to add vitality to the designs (Gillmor, 2006). These changes are discussed in the main text under the appropriate jacket.

       FROM BUTTERFLIES TO ORKNEY

       The Jackets by Clifford &Rosemary Ellis

       1 Butterflies E. B. Ford, 1945

      The dust jacket of Butterflies must be one of the best-known images in the world of natural history publishing – so familiar in fact that it is hard to recapture how unusual it must have seemed when the book was first put on sale in November 1945. For those used to more conventional book jackets, this design, in which the caterpillar is so much more prominent than the adult butterfly, both conveyed in terms of form and colour rather than strict scientific fidelity, must have raised a few eyebrows. C&RE’s first jacket design certainly helped СКАЧАТЬ