RETIREMENT YEARS
Clifford and Rosemary had bought a house in a Wiltshire village just below the downs where the family moved in 1972. One sunny room was allocated as a studio, and another became home to Clifford’s large and wide-ranging book collection. Below the house, Clifford planted a new valley garden with an artist’s eye. He continued to teach, part-time, on adult education courses, and he and Rosemary collaborated with others on the texts of educational books for children. Rosemary pursued her photographic interests and, with her elder daughter, Penelope, produced numerous sets of large prints illustrating aspects of the natural and man-made world. They also, of course, continued to design the New Naturalist book jackets as well as some of those of the Collins Countryside series. Both their daughters qualified, Penelope as a sculptor at the Slade and subsequently as a teacher at the Institute of Education at London University, and Charlotte as an architect at the Regent Street Polytechnic.
Book jacket designed by c&re, 1945 and published by Collins. The author, Stuart Smith went on to write The Yellow Wagtail in the NN monographs.
Clifford died, after a short illness, 19 March 1985, aged 78. Rosemary and Penelope continued to live in the same house until Rosemary’s death, aged 87, on Ascension Day, 21 May 1998. They are buried in the same grave on a grassy plot in the village cemetery below the downs under a headstone (carved by Penelope with some advice from Charlotte), inscribed simply ‘C&RE ‘with their respective dates.
THE NEW NATURALIST JACKETS
The House of Collins was not, until the New Naturalist library appeared, noted for imaginative jackets for their non-fiction titles. For the great wartime series, Britain in Pictures, the jacket had simply repeated the pattern stamped on the boards; it did little more than provide the title of the book and a common branding. The lowly role of such ‘wrappers’ is summed up in a piece of doggerel the New Naturalist collector Roger Long once found inscribed on the wrapper of a book of verse:
This outer wrap is only meant To keep my coat from detriment. Please take it off, and let me show The better one I wear below.
The New Naturalists were different. The war was still on when Clifford and Rosemary designed their first New Naturalist jackets, Butterflies and London’s Natural History, in autumn 1944. The first dozen or so were done at home at Lansdown Road, Bath, and the later ones, until 1972, at Corsham Court or while on family holidays, often abroad. The jackets were all based on first-hand research, and, as often as not, involved journeys to look for suitable material for a jacket. For example, they made a special trip to Dartmoor, and, later on, visited both Orkney and (Clifford alone) Shetland for their respective jackets. Sometimes material was found much closer to home, such as for Lords and Ladies and the bee orchid for the discarded jacket of Wild Orchids which were found growing by the north walk at Corsham Court. For The Pollination of Flowers, Clifford visited the Hatherley Laboratories at Exeter University to see Michael Proctor and hear about his work on pollination photography. Each jacket was the result of research, sketches, colour experiments, and much thought before arriving at a suitably arresting image.
The basic form of the New Naturalist jacket was worked out on the very first jacket, Butterflies, and continues, barely changed, 65 years later. Its distinctive style has no obvious link to other book jackets published at the time by Collins, and it seems likely, though nothing we have seen explicitly says so, that every element on it – the coloured band with the title in nearly all cases spelt out in white, the oval on the spine containing the New Naturalist ‘colophon’, and the wrap-around, lithographic image itself – was thought out by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis. They also designed the distinctive New Naturalist symbol of two conjoined letters N, together with the charming idea of a small symbolic image where the letters meet. Similarly, they designed the special monograph colophon of ‘NMN’, which was worked out with pencil on the commissioning letter from Collins. The idea of a numbered series was, however, probably taken from the long-running Britain in Pictures series published by Collins and Adprint between 1941 and 1945. It was implicit from the start that this would be another numbered ‘library’ of books.
Art jackets were not new in 1944; Clifford and Rosemary had themselves designed jackets for Jonathan Cape. The first book jackets that aimed to be more than pictorial paper bags had appeared in the early 20th century, and by the 1930s a new generation of artists like Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious had begun to specialise in the medium, producing jackets that look vivid and fresh even today. Adventurous jackets were not confined to works of fiction. For the English Life series published by Batsford, Brian Cook produced dazzling wrap-around designs that exploited a new process for overlaying coloured transparent inks of high intensity that were, in his words, ‘blatant, bizarre, strident and unreal’ (Cook, 1987). Encouraged by craftsman-printers like Thomas Griffits, lithography became a popular printing method to produce jackets of brilliant colour and bold graphic form. World War II and rationing brought most of this to a screeching halt, and the bookshops of the immediate postwar world were a good deal dingier than before. Fortunately the firm of Collins was a printer as well as a publisher, and had stocks in hand to make a splash with the new series.
While the public were used to seeing art jackets around books, they might have been surprised to see them on books about butterflies and geology. It would be an exaggeration to say that the New Naturalist jackets created a sensation, but they certainly impressed the booksellers and William Collins was much encouraged by the positive trade response to the first two Ellis jackets. The colours were bright but not garish, reminiscent of lithographic prints, and produced using matt inks on rough-surfaced paper. They strongly implied something new and in which Collins took great pride. It was unusual, even then, for jackets to be completely hand-drawn, right down to the series colophon and title lettering. They caught the eye, as intended, but the books also sat sweetly together on the shelf, more and more so as the series expanded. Perhaps few jackets had paid such close attention to the spine and the way it fitted into the rest of the design. They might have been more stunning still if the artists had been allowed to carry on the design over to the back of the book, as Brian Cook did on the Batsford books, but that space was needed to advertise, and later to list other titles in the series.
To summarise the New Naturalist jacket:
1 It portrayed the contents of the book in bold forms and bright colours, printed by craft methods. The arts-and-craft look was intensified by the exquisite hand-lettering of the early titles.
2 The design was ‘bled off’, that is, there was no frame or margin. It ran over the edge in every direction except one, where the design petered over on to the back, ending not in a mechanical line but in brushstrokes.
3 The jackets were, at least initially, prepared for printing by skilled lithographers used to interpreting the ideas of an artist.
4 The book was easy and pleasant to handle because the design was printed on slightly rough paper and did not slip. For the same reason it fitted snugly to the buckram binding of the book.
5 The jackets showed ‘forms of nature’ interpreted by sympathetic and knowledgeable artists that gave them vitality and inner life. They were intended to intrigue. They were not intended to shock, but perhaps, especially at first, they did.
WINNING ROUND THE SCIENTISTS
My book, The New Naturalists, describes in some detail how William Collins conceived this ground-breaking series of nature books, and the board of celebrity scientists which he set up to commission books and oversee their production. The committee was headed by Julian Huxley, perhaps then Britain’s best-known biologist, but the key personality on it was his energetic protégé, James Fisher. The young Fisher was full of fire about the advance of natural history