James Barlow, The Hour of Maximum Danger (Hamilton, 1962)

No. 2 in a series of posts on books I've bought but haven't got round to blogging about properly – indeed may never get round to blogging about properly – so this will have to do.

What is it?
A British first edition of James Barlow's spy thriller The Hour of Maximum Danger, published in hardback by Hamish Hamilton in 1962.

Who designed the dust jacket?
Val Biro.

Where and when did I buy it?
Now you're asking. I think I bought it in the Arundel branch of the Kim's chain of secondhand bookshops, although it could've been in the late lamented Dim and Distant in Heathfield. Either way it was a good two or three years ago.

Why did I buy it?
Mostly that dust jacket, a splendid Braque-like effort by Val Biro, of which Val noted when I showed it to him the year before he died: "An artist keeps his eyes open to what's happening in the art world, and I was quite taken by this kind of abstraction." But the fact that the novel's a spy thriller – and an intriguing one at that – also helped sway me, plus Barlow's writing is well liked in some quarters.

Have I read it yet?
Nope.

An Interview with Val Biro, Artist, Illustrator, Author and Book Cover Designer

NB: Val Biro passed away last month, at the age of 92 (Guardian obituary here). I've written about Val and his terrific dust jacket designs a number of times on Existential Ennui – follow this link to previous posts, or take a look at the examples of his dust wrapper work on this page – and last year had the opportunity to interview him in person about that work. The resulting article, an edited version of which appears below, was initially intended for Illustrators Quarterly, who in the wake of Val's passing will instead be running a more substantial feature on Val's life and art (drawing in part on my interview) to appear late this year/early next year. In the meantime, Illustrators have graciously given me the go-ahead to publish my original piece, which I present as my personal tribute to Val and his work, illustrated with wrappers and roughs from my own collection.

If you spend any amount of time browsing the hardback fiction shelves in secondhand bookshops – as I do, whenever I get the opportunity (and probably more than is entirely healthy) – chances are you'll have unwittingly encountered the work of Val Biro. Not as an author: for that aspect of Val's career you'd be better off heading to the children's section, where you'll doubtless find a selection of the 37 picture books he wrote and drew from 1966 to 2001, all starring Gumdrop, a vintage 1926 Austin 12/4 motorcar. No, the Biro work you'll see in the fiction department is of a different stripe. It was created both prior to and parallel with his children's titles, and the books it was made for number in their thousands.

From the early 1940s until the late 1970s Val Biro designed an estimated 3,000 dust jackets – more than any other jacket designer of the era. His artwork wrapped books by C. S. Forester and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Nevil Shute and James Hadley Chase; Iris Murdoch and Geoffrey Household – from crime thrillers to romance, literature to non-fiction, and for every major publisher. It's a remarkable body of work, encompassing not only the finished jackets but the preparatory roughs too – sometimes multiple roughs for a single wrapper – the vast majority with hand lettering painted directly onto the artwork.

His covers are instantly recognisable: a striking central image – evoking the feel of the novel overall rather than a particular scene – done in dry brush (gouache), often restricted to just two or three colours, i.e. three-colour line, "which in those days was quite popular because it was cheap to reproduce", as Val himself explained to me when I pinned him down for a chat at a book fair he was a guest at. He created his first wrapper as a freelance designer in 1942, for the Collins edition of Rex Stout's The Broken Vase (for which he was paid five guineas); at that time he was also employed as an assistant at Sylvan Press – illustrating interiors and covers – having spent three years at the Central School of Art after emigrating to the UK from Hungary in 1939. But by 1953, after a stint with John Lehmann Limited, Val was ready to take the plunge and go fully freelance.

In common with other jacket designers of the era, Val was rarely given a brief; instead he would read each novel he was designing the cover for, a practice virtually unheard of these days. "It would be: here's a manuscript, come up with a good design," he recalls. "They'd tell me whether it's full colour, or three-colour line, and the size. Then I'd do the roughs, which I put a lot of work into. Occasionally I would do two or even three roughs to give them a choice. I worked hard in those days!"

Val reckons his work rate in the very early days of his freelance wrapper designing would equate to "about four jackets a month – one a week. But when I went big time with it, I would have about fifteen commissions at any one time. At one point I did almost nothing else but book jackets." After reading a book he would produce a rough – which would take about half a day, working at the same size as the eventual wrapper so the publisher could see how the finished book would look (the final artwork would be produced at a quarter- or half-up) – in which he would "try to reflect the character of the whole story, not based on one particular scene but... encapsulating a whole book in one design". That rough and any variants Val had come up with would then be sent in to the publisher for approval – a process which was not, it seems, always straightforward...

"I remember, Mr. Walter Hutchinson himself, the eponymous publisher, he insisted on seeing a rough but it had to be twice up, full colour, everything. I was told he usually received the art editor in bed – well, he was in bed, because he liked the late mornings. The art editor would come in and say, Mr. Hutchinson, this is the cover for so-and-so, and give it to him. If he didn't like it, he would get out an indelible blue pencil, and with a 'no', put a line through it, ruining the picture."

Thankfully the pencil-wielding Mr. Hutchinson was in the minority; other publishers and art editors weren't quite so physical with their criticisms, and many of Val's roughs survive today. Indeed, Val has fond memories of most of the publishers he worked for, whether it be Michael Joseph, who commissioned him to design the wrappers for the first half-dozen Hornblower novels by C. S. Forester, or Hodder & Stoughton, who not only sent plenty of dust jacket work his way but also, from the 1960s on, published his own Gumdrop books (under their Brockhampton Press children's imprint). And admirers of his work didn't just number publishers and art directors; Nevil Shute, for whose novels Val designed the wrappers for In the Wet (1953), Requiem for a Wren (1955) and others, was certainly impressed by what he saw. "We received a letter from Mr. Shute from Australia," Val recalls with pride. "He said to the publisher, 'Thank you for employing an artist who evidently knows Australia well.' I'd never been there in my life!"

Val was just one among a multitude of book jacket designers beavering away in the '40s, '50s and '60s, all offering their own take on the restricted palette style – largely unsung artists like Donald Green, Peter Probyn, John Rowland, Roy Sanford and sisters Barbara and Eileen Walton (not to mention the rather better appreciated likes of Denis McLoughlin and Brian Wildsmith). Of his contemporaries, Val singles out Hans Tisdall, perhaps best known these days as a painter but back then also a book designer (his most famous wrapper probably being for Lampedusa's The Leopard) "who worked in a style not unlike the three-colour line which was typical of me in those days. I never met him but I admired his work. To an extent my lettering is influenced by him."

A greater influence came courtesy of Val's time at Central School. A number of Val's wrappers are reminiscent of woodcut prints – his jacket for Victor Canning's 1961 novel A Delivery of Furies, say – which, it turns out, was no accident: "I started as a wood engraver. At art college my tutor was John Farleigh – great name in his day. I did some, I think, very good engravings under his influence. But when I came to book jackets I realised that the timescale – I usually would get about a couple of weeks at most from rough to finish – was very tight. An engraving would take me about a fortnight to do!"

Towards the end of the 1970s Val's time as a jacket designer "as a main activity" drew to a close. "I became so involved in children's books and my own Gumdrops that I didn't have time or, actually, the interest. The problem with a jacket is, it's basically the same, isn't it?" he muses. "To encapsulate a whole book in one design. Which is interesting. But there came a time when I was much more interested in writing my own stories and developing my own books."

Working methods in jacket design had changed too – the introduction of Letraset and greater use of separations and superimposing – and this was also a factor in Val's decision to move on to other endeavours. While he, of course, as a professional, adapted to these changes, he much preferred his original way of working, "because it was very much integrated – I mean the design and the lettering was all one piece, whereas if you superimpose it it's not quite the same thing." As for more contemporary dust jacket design, it must be said that he's not overly keen: "A lot of it is computer-generated... I can't see today the individual hand, the person who's done it. It's often done in-house rather than by a freelancer, some of it by computer, and the concept is usually the concept of a committee rather than a single mind."

Instead, Val has continued to carve out a place in publishing history as an in-demand children's book author and illustrator. Now in his nineties, his most recent project has been a series of 200-page fully illustrated hardbacks for Award Publications, retellings of Aesop's Fables and Grimm's/Hans Christian Andersen's/Charles Perrault's Fairy Tales; the latest volume, based on the Arabian Nights, was in-progress when we spoke, but Val expects that "will probably be my last book because I can't imagine taking on a big commission like that again, at 91."

Even without all of his children's titles, his astonishing body of dust jacket work must surely stand as one of the greatest achievements in book design – 3,000 covers in less than 40 years. An incredible amount of work, agrees Val, but his only explanation for this prodigious output is as matter-of-fact as one would expect of this softly spoken, unassuming man: "I was probably the busiest jacket designer at that time in the country."

Val Biro on His Dust Jacket Designs

Geoffrey Household, A Time to Kill (Michael Joseph, 1952, sequel to A Rough Shoot): "This is two-colour line, dark red and black – the white is the paper – so it's two colours. This could be reproduced on line blocks without a screen, and therefore not art paper but ordinary cartridge. Very effective."

Nevil Shute, In the Wet (Heinemann, 1953): "This isn't based on a particular scene but on the feel of the flooded landscape."

Victor Canning, The Burning Eye (Hodder & Stoughton, 1960): "I used dry brush because it had to be reproduced by line rather than halftone. You had to be careful that you worked in such a way that it reproduced well."

James Barlow, The Hour of Maximum Danger (Hamish Hamilton, 1962): "An artist keeps his eyes open to what's happening in the art world, and I was quite taken by this kind of abstraction. But after the abstract era I left the conceptualists and so on totally aside because that's not me at all."

The Secondhand Bookshops of Suffolk: Aldeburgh and Westleton, Guest-Starring Manning O'Brine and Elleston Trevor

As we reach the end of the first week of posts about my – and Rachel and little Edie's – recent holiday to Suffolk, and with a second and possibly even (heaven forfend) a third week of such posts in prospect, it occurs to me in passing that I may be trying the patience of even the most ardent and steadfast of Existential Ennui readers with this absurdly self-indulgent endeavour, which, if the missives thus far are anything to go by, and the odd book-focused interlude aside, will continue to consist largely of a succession of pictures of me and a supposedly cute baby in front of a variety of secondhand bookshops in whichever godforsaken Suffolk town or village I've dragged Rachel and Edie to on the pretence of it being picturesque.

Still: in for a penny, eh?

So then. Where were we? Halesworth, that's where, the base location for the week's holiday, from which locale we ranged far and wide over the eastern bit of Suffolk, in the first instance to the seaside town of Southwold, where, sadly, there are no secondhand bookshops (although my good friend and colleague Roly Allen, who's very familiar with the area, assures me there used to be about four), and then to the similarly coastal but not quite as quaint Aldeburgh, where there is a single secondhand bookshop:

Reed Books 2. Apparently there was at one point a Reed Books 1, but it didn't seem to exist by the time we got there – a shame, because while Edie nabbed herself a Noddy in Reed Books 2 (the first book in the series, Noddy Goes to Toyland), there wasn't anything for me, and I suspect most serious secondhand book collectors would struggle to find much of interest either. Unlike the next bookshop we ventured to:

Chapel Books, in the little village of Westleton, about six miles north of Aldeburgh. As the shop's name suggests, it's based in an old chapel, with shelves arranged in a pleasingly haphazard fashion around the hall, and the occasional charming offer of tea from the proprietor (although it was a bit too hot the day we were there to take him up on it). Even though there was only a small crime fiction section, tucked away in the far corner, there was still plenty for both me and Edie to look at:

Lots of children's books, evidently, but also a good range of non-fiction, vintage paperbacks, science fiction, and a decent holding of modern firsts. I eventually emerged with three books:

Er, and a baby (Edie, in case there's any confusion). One of those books will form the basis of the next post, but the other two were:

A first Corgi paperback printing of Manning O'Brine's The Hungry Killer, published in 1956 (the same year as the Hammond hardback edition), cover art by John Richards (who also did the cover art for my 1955 Corgi paperback of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man), and:

A 1955 Heinemann first edition of Elleston Trevor's The Big Pick-Up, dust jacket design by the great Val Biro.

O'Brine has been on my radar for a while now – indeed I have a first edition of his 1970 novel Crambo, the second in his three-book Mills espionage series, waiting to be blogged about. The Hungry Killer is part of an earlier, longer spy series starring Michael The O'Kelly – the fifth book in the series in fact, and notably scarce: there are only three copies in any edition on AbeBooks at present, none of them the Corgi paperback.

Trevor, on the other hand, is probably better known round these here parts under another of his aliases: Adam Hall, author of the nineteen Quiller spy novels (and one standalone thriller). However, The Big Pick-Up isn't an espionage work: like another Trevor novel I blogged about back in 2011 (The Killing Ground, 1956), it's a World War II tale, in this instance set during the Dunkirk evacuation; there's a review of it over at the Broken Trails blog.

Jacket designer Val Biro I've written about numerous times, and his wrapper for The Big Pick-Up is another cracker, that big, bold but elegant hand-lettering standing in marked contrast to the freely daubed gouache paint behind. Needless to say, it's now taken its place in my Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1960s and 1960s gallery, alongside eleven other fine examples of Val's work (and taking the number of covers on the page up to a remarkable 111).

As for the third book I bought, and why it's special enough to warrant its own post: all will be revealed soon.

Francis Clifford's Honour the Shrine (Cape, 1953) & Helen MacInnes's Pray for a Brave Heart (Collins, 1955) Join Beautiful British Book Jackets

Let's take a look at the two latest additions to the still-expanding (these covers will take it up to 104 entries) Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s gallery – the first one of which I could do with some assistance identifying the jacket designer:

Namely Honour the Shrine by Francis Clifford, published by Jonathan Cape in 1953. There's no credit on either flap and no signature that I can see; I did wonder if it might be by Val Biro, but I put it in front of Val at a Lewes Book Fair last year and he thought not. Mind you, when I asked Val to sign the jacket of Desmond Cory's Secret Ministry at an earlier Midhurst Book Fair, he told me that wasn't one of his wrappers either – until his agent, David Schutte, pointed out Val's signature in the bottom left corner (Val did, after all, design an estimated 3,000 dust jackets). Plus, Val was doing a little work for Cape around this period (as was Hans Tisdall, who also comes to mind as a possible culprit) – he designed the wrapper for the 1953 Cape first of Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope for one – so he could have misremembered. In any case, until confirmation is forthcoming, the cover is consigned to the "Designer Unknown" group at the bottom of Beautiful British Book Jacket Design.

No such confusion surrounds the book itself, however, at least not round these parts, because I've blogged about it before, in its 1957 Corgi paperback incarnation. Clifford's debut, and quite uncommon these days (there are barely a dozen copies in any edition on AbeBooks at present, none of those the Cape first), it's one of a number of the author's novels I've spotlighted – see also Time Is an Ambush (1962), The Green Fields of Eden (1963), The Hunting-Ground (1964) and The Naked Runner (1966) – the jackets from the first editions of all four of which are also featured in Beautiful British Book Jacket Design.

And there's little doubt as to who was responsible for the dust jacket design of the second new addition to the gallery, despite there once again being no credit on the flaps:

This is the British first edition of Pray for a Brave Heart by Helen Macinnes, published by Collins in 1955 and bought by me just the other week for two quid in the excellent Tome in Eastbourne. MacInnes's ninth novel, it's one of fourteen MacInnes spy thrillers that Titan Books have brought back into print since last year. The wrapper isn't, as I say, credited, but it does bear a signature: "Petty". That's almost certainly the Australian political cartoonist Bruce Petty, who evidently had a nice sideline designing jackets in the 1950s; other examples of his jacket work include a further three wrappers for Collins in 1955 – Jon Cleary's Justin Bayard, Laselle Gilman's The Dragon's Mouth and Kem Bennett's Dangerous Knowledge – along with Edward Maxwell's Quest for Pajaro (Heinemann, 1957), Tom Girtin's Not Entirely Serious (Hutchinson, 1958) and Robin Maugham's The Man with Two Shadows (Longmans, Green, 1958).

So, two further splendid duotone dust jackets for Beautiful British Book Jacket Design. And I'm not done with the gallery just yet...

A Custom Domain for Existential Ennui, and 100 Beautiful British '50s and '60s (and '40s and '70s) Dust Jackets

Hang up the bunting and balloons, uncork the champagne and let the drunken revelry commence, because with the addition of those Val Biro/Victor Canning wrappers the other day, I'm immensely pleased to announce that nearly seven months on from its inauguration, there are now 100 dust jackets on the Existential Ennui Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s permanent page. Woo-hoo! All very exciting, I'm sure you'll agree, and I'll be getting into how we got here and where we might be going next in a moment. But first, an announcement: to celebrate this centenary of spectacular cover art, I've gone and done something a bit radical to Existential Ennui – besides widening it and introducing a new subtitle, I mean. If you cast your eyes up to the top of your browser, you should be able to see that the URL of Existential Ennui has changed (if it hasn't, click on the masthead). Hitherto it was:

http://existentialennui.blogspot.com – or ".co.uk", or ".com.au", etc., depending on where you were in the world (Blogger, the platform on which EE resides, having introduced region-specific URLs last year). But henceforth, it shall be:

http://www.existentialennui.com/

That's right: I've registered a custom domain name. It's something I've been considering for a while now, probably ever since Existential Ennui began to find its feet in 2010 as, essentially, a repository of bibliomaniacal esoterica (not to mention baseless conjecture, bad puns and prolix navel-gazing – this post being a case in point), and by the middle of last year I'd pretty much decided I wanted to take the plunge. Unfortunately, when I went to register the domain name I desired – the one I now have, existentialennui.com – I discovered that it wasn't available. Turns out someone had bought it and was evidently looking to make some money out of it: if you keyed in that URL, you'd find a message to the effect that anyone interested in the domain name should contact the then-owners. I thought about inquiring into how much it would cost to buy it off them, whoever they were, but I figured that the very act of contacting them would put me in a weak negotiating position (yeah, check me, all Gordon Gekko) and I'd end up having to pay through the nose for the privilege of using a domain name I'd effectively already established though my own blood, sweat and tears (just Google "existential ennui" to see what I mean). Of course, I could have stuck a dash between "existential" and "ennui", or perhaps plumped for an address ending in ".net", or some variation thereof, but that didn't feel right either. So I elected to leave it and keep an eye on the situation, with a view to revisiting the idea down the line.

Fast forward to earlier this week, and on a whim I decided to check if whoever it was who had their greasy mitts on existentialennui.com had, by some miracle, relinquished their grip. And bugger me with a broom handle, they had: the domain was available through Blogger. So, quick as a flash (actually not that quick: I mulled it over again for another day), I nabbed it.

What this will mean in practical terms is probably – hopefully – very little: all being well, any links via the old URL will eventually redirect to the new one (although you might want to update your bookmarks – that is, if anyone has bookmarked EE – just in case). But to me, somehow, it makes Existential Ennui seem more permanent. Oh, I'm sure that isn't actually the case: websites, and especially blogs, are by their very nature transitory things, and should Blogger ever fall over or vanish, I expect EE will disappear along with it (although the British Library UK Web Archive version of EE should survive). Which I guess means it must be more of a psychological thing – something to do with ".com" feeling more like a proper website than ".blogspot.com". Whatever: as I write, the transition process is well underway. Be aware, however, that there may be some disruption and side effects – current ones being that:

a) it might look, at the moment, as though are two Existential Ennuis (as if one weren't quite enough): a ".com" version and a ".blogspot.com" one as well. Don't ask me why that is; by all accounts it's just a thing that happens when you buy a custom domain, and will, I'm reliably informed, correct itself in time. And:

b) all of the blogs I'd gathered together in my Other Fine Blogs blogroll sidebar disappeared, so I'm having to reconstitute the list; if there are any fellow bloggers reading this who know for a fact they were listed, give me a nudge and I'll reinstate you.

UPDATE: I've since noticed another side effect.

Anyway: to the Beautiful British Book Jackets. And although as a rule I try to resist any emotions as base and vulgar as pride (it goeth before destruction, apparently), I must admit I'm pretty pleased not only to have reached 100 covers, but with the page's reception. Certainly it's proved by far the most popular part of Existential Ennui, racking up seven-and a-half-thousand hits in its own right in under seven months, which ain't too shabby. Clearly the notion of showcasing some of the best examples of dust jacket design from the 1950s and '60s has struck a chord, and the innovation – such as it is – of listing the jackets under their designers rather than authors or book titles has resulted in multiple links from Wikipedia – witness the Wikipedia pages for, among others, Graham Greene's The Quiet American and A Burnt-Out Case, Michael Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning, Nevil Shute's On the Beach, Alistair MacLean's Ice Station Zebra and James Hadley Chase's I Would Rather Stay Poor. Indeed, whoever edited those last two pages even had the temerity to use my covers to illustrate them. Honestly. The cheek of it.

All that said, the page hasn't developed quite how I envisioned. My original intention was to showcase jackets which typified the bold, duo-tone (or restricted palette), chiaroscuro style prevalent in the '50s and '60s, i.e. wrappers by the likes Val Biro, Denis McLoughlin, Donald Green, Peter Probyn and Roy Sanford. Right from the get-go, though, I muddied the waters by including Gavin Lyall's more illustrative jacket for his own The Wrong Side of the Sky (basically because I love it), and then further muddied them by including Peter Calcott's more graphic wrapper for Francis Clifford's The Naked Runner in the second batch. Still, even though these and subsequent additions, like Kenneth Farnhill's very simple designs for Agatha Christie first editions, perhaps diluted the original intent of the page, they're still fine examples of jacket design in their own right, and I don't regret their inclusion.

One thing I came to realise as I added more and more wrappers to the page was that I'd ever-so-slightly shot myself in the foot by restricting the period covered by the gallery to the 1950s and '60s. It dawned on me that there were plenty of examples of excellent illustrated design from the 1940s and 1970s too, which was why I elected to include the odd wrapper from the latter and earlier parts of those two decades, respectively. In retrospect I probably should have called the page "Beautiful Postwar Book Jacket Design" or something (although I maintain that the '50s and '60s boast far more fine examples than the decades either side), but the URL (are we back on those again...?) has already changed once – when I took off the redundant "Existential Ennui" prefix – resulting in broken links, so I was reluctant to change it again.

Tangentially related to that is a minor lament: I haven't yet got round to including any wrappers from novels by one of my favourite authors, Ross Thomas (unlike some of my other favourite authors – stand up Donald E. Westlake and Patricia Highsmith). The two best British Thomas wrappers, to my mind, date from 1970 – Wilson Buchanan's one for The Fools in Town Are on Our Side and Kaye Bellman's one for The Brass Go-Between – both of which I could, I guess, still add to the page – except I don't think I'll be venturing beyond 100 covers. Having that number of images on one page is already, I know, proving problematic for some viewers, and for my part I'm leery of continuing to monkey about with the page behind the scenes, for fear that I could, accidentally, delete the whole bloody thing (you may mock, but I've done that many a time before with draft blog posts).

And therein lies a conundrum: if I'm not going to expand or alter the page – and I reserve the right to change my mind on that one – where next? The obvious answer is, of course, a new page! Or perhaps pages, plural. For example, I've still got wrappers I've yet to unveil by Val Biro and Denis McLoughlin – the two artists represented by the greatest number of jackets on the current page – so it makes sense to dedicate a permanent page each to them, encompassing all of their work in Beautiful British Book Jackets, plus more besides. Alternatively, I could construct a more focused page, just highlighting those restricted-palette wrappers I had in mind for the extant gallery. I could even start a paperback cover page, although given that there are countless blogs and websites devoted to pulpy paperback cover art – which would be the area I'd concentrate on – that seems a little superfluous.

In the short term, I suspect Biro and McLoughlin are the most likely options, but I do have lots of books I've not yet blogged about which also boast lovely jackets by other designers, so there'll probably be at least one other page besides those at some point. As ever, if anyone has any suggestions or preferences, let me know via the comments. For now, though, go feast your eyes on 100 Beautiful British Book Jackets from the 1950s, 1960s – and beyond...

Val Biro Dust Jackets for Four Victor Canning Novels (Hodder & Stoughton 1958–62); Lewes Book Bargains

I've written about the relationship between authors and cover artists – how, either through happenstance or design (the latter usually on the part of the publisher or author), a particular designer will wind up creating a run of dust jackets for a particular author – once or twice before, most recently in this post on Peter Probyn's jackets for three Francis Clifford novels. Given that dust jacket designer extraordinaire Val Biro produced in the region of 3,000 wrappers in his career, probably more than any other artist, it's perhaps unsurprising that there are many, many instances where he illustrated wrappers for multiple entries in various authors' canons. Indeed, thriller novelist Victor Canning doesn't even rank among those authors who could claim ten or even twenty or more Biro jackets to their names; to my knowledge, Biro illustrated the wrappers of just four Canning novels, towards the end of Canning's time at Hodder & Stoughton.

But it so happens that I now own all four of those books – all first editions, all bought in and around my hometown of Lewes (I think; I know The Dragon Tree came from Revive All under the Needlemakers and A Delivery of Furies from the Lewes Antique Centre, but I can't for the life of me remember where the other two came from – except that I'm pretty sure it was somewhere round this way). And since the Existential Ennui Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s permanent page needs just three covers to take it up to the magic number of 100, and Canning falls within the broad remit of Existential Ennui, and I'm an admirer (and collector) of Val Biro's work (there were nine of his covers on the page even before these additions), a Canning/Biro dust jacket gallery strikes me as an entirely apt way in which to reach 100 wrappers.

Apt in another way, too; because as the sharper tools among you might have noticed, while the Beautiful British Book Jacket page needs just three wrappers to get to 100, I'm presenting four in this post. Reason being, one of the jackets, for A Delivery of Furies, has already made it onto the page – in fact it was the cover I used to introduce the page aaaalllllll the way back in March of this year. So it's kind of fitting that it's here again – in an even more vibrant, re-scanned form – along with its brethren to celebrate the centenary (sort of) of Beautiful British Book Jackets. Obviously it was all planned right from the start...

Anyway, all of the covers in this post have now been added to the Beautiful Book Jackets gallery – but hold off on the celebratory cake, balloons, jelly and ice cream for the moment, because I'll be back in a bit with a proper "reaching the 100 dust jackets milestone" post, including some thoughts on how the page has developed from the initial concept, conjecture on where it might be going next, and, quite possibly, yet another special announcement. For now, though, enjoy the Biro/Canning jackets – and follow the links on each title for some insight into the books from the excellent, incredibly thorough Victor Canning pages.

The Dragon Tree by Victor Canning (Hodder & Stoughton, 1958)

The Burning Eye by Victor Canning (Hodder & Stoughton, 1960)

A Delivery of Furies by Victor Canning (Hodder & Stoughton, 1961)

Black Flamingo by Victor Canning (Hodder & Stoughton, 1962); note Val Biro signature on front flap, obtained, in person, very recently...

New Beautiful British Book Covers: Most Unnatural Murder by Fiona Sinclair; A Spy in the Hand by Henry Talbot; Death in the Lebanon by John Tyndall

Time, I think, for some more Beautiful British Book Jacket Design. The addition of Victor Reinganum's wrapper for John Wain's Nuncle and Other Stories to the BBBJD gallery on Friday brought the number of dust jackets on the page up to 87, which, let's face it, is no kind of number to leave the total at. So I've now added a further three jackets to take it up to 90 – getting ever closer to the magic 100 – all of which wrap books I bought on a visit to secondhand bookshop Dim and Distant in Heathfield, East Sussex, and all of which were created by designers already represented in the gallery. Let's take a look at 'em in order of publication, shall we?

Most Unnatural Murder by Fiona Sinclair, published by Geoffrey Bles in 1965. The dust jacket on this one was designed by Donald Green, and to my mind it's every bit as good as his distinctive wrappers for C. S. Forester's The General, Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon and P. M. Hubbard's The Tower. For her part, Sinclair is an overlooked but intriguing author: she wrote a series of crime novels starring Superintendent Paul Grainger and one or two standalone works – Most Unnatural Murder being one. Many of her books were published posthumously, Sinclair having died at a fairly young age in 1961; Most Unnatural Murder was apparently found among her papers after her death.

Next:

A Spy in the Hand by Henry Talbot, published by Robert Hale in 1966. There aren't many photographic covers in the Beautiful British Book Jackets gallery, but this one is worth including, I think, for a couple of reasons: it's nicely balanced – typographically simple but effective – and it was put together by a designer of whom I'm a great admirer and who's much better known for his illustrative covers: Val Biro. I was surprised when I saw Val's name listed as jacket designer on the front flap, but I've since discovered that he designed other photographic wrappers besides this one; David Schutte, Val's agent, thinks that possibly the photographs were supplied by the publisher and Val simply arranged the typography, but I must admit the other covers I've seen are quite similar, so I wonder if Val did in fact take the photos himself.

The author of this one, Henry Talbot, is even more obscure than Fiona Sinclair. There's very little information about him online and A Spy in the Hand is, I believe, his only novel under that name, but as Henry Talbot Rothwell and H. T. Rothwell he seems to have written a handful of other espionage thrillers for Hale in the mid- to late-1960s, including Exit a Spy (1966), Duet for Three Spies (1967) and No Honour Amongst Spies (1969). Of course, I might have got my wires crossed there, so do let me know if you happen have any further information on Talbot/Rothwell.

Finally:

Death in the Lebanon by John Tyndall, published by Geoffrey Bles. Now, this one actually dates from 1971, which should, by all rights, put it beyond the remit of Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s. But its dust jacket was designed by Cecil Walter Bacon, who I wrote about in this post on P. M. Hubbard's Cold Waters, and whose work, I'd suggest, owes more to the approach to dust jacket design in the '50s and '60s than it does to that of the '70s. Plus Bacon's wrapper for Death in the Lebanon is a splendid piece of design and illustration, and it's my gallery and I'll include it if I want to, so ner.

As for the author of Death in the Lebanon, John Tyndall, again there's practically nothing about him online. He seems to have written just two novels – this one and Death in the Jordan (1970), which also stars the lead of Death in the Lebanon, detective Roger Turnbull. However, there is quite a famous John Tydnall – the onetime leader of the National Front and founder of the British National Party – and on his Wikipedia page Death in the Lebanon is listed as one of his published works. Of course, Wikipedia isn't always the most reliable of resources, so that could just be a mistake – and as commenter C points out below, it seems fairly unlikely. But if anyone can confirm or deny one way or the other, do please drop me a line or leave a comment.

Anyway, I'm aiming to get the Beautiful British Book Jacket gallery up to 100 covers over the course of the next month or so, so stay tuned for further additions. But I've some book covers of a different order lined up for the next post: a gallery of the British paperback first edition covers for Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake's Parker crime novels in the late-1960s...