This is a glorious book with one crippling flaw. Let's put the ecstasy before the agony. Faber and Faber, founded in 1929, commissioned some of the best book jackets of all time; Private Eye, retracting its claws for once, called the firm Fabber and Fabber — of course that applied to the authors as well as the designs. A few of the designs seem dated in a bad sense, but most of them are joyfully, exhilaratingly redolent of their time — especially the art deco and ‘Contemp’ry’ ones.
They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover — an update on ‘Fine feathers don’t make fine birds’ — but you can judge a lot of these books by their jackets. When you see the front of Arnold Whittick’s Eric Mendelsohn (about the German modernist architect), with the sweeping round shape of a characteristic building, you know what’s within is likely to be similarly striking — and it is.
Joseph Connolly’s book is mainly pictorial — one long panorama of Faber covers, in broadly chronological sequence. The man who designed more than anybody else was the German refugee Berthold Wolpe, Faber’s in-house artist.
He was a brilliant designer, though I have never liked his quirky Albertus type, which I feel belongs more on the façade of a Chinese restaurant than a book of poems. Others who designed for the firm are Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman, David Jones, Charles Mozley and Rex Whistler. Apart from the visual feast, this book is worth buying for two things: Joseph Connolly’s delightfully off-the-cuff, informal history of the firm and recollections of his own associations with it, first as a writer on modern editions, later as a novelist; and (printed for us by Connolly) Lawrence Durrell’s hilarious letters of complaint to Wolpe about the designs for his novels. The sustained moans cry out for an honoured place in one of John Julius Norwich’s Christmas Crackers, but I can’t resist stealing a little of his thunder by giving you the opening of a Durrell letter to Wolpe of 1961 about the jacket for The Dark Labyrinth:
Dear Mr Wolpe,
It was good of you to send the cover mock-up. But what am I to tell you honestly? It seems to me beyond words horrible; and yet this is offensive to say to an artist of experience like yourself. This dreadful puce! And I really think that two drunken snails dipped in permanganate could have produced more aesthetically pleasing shapes...
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