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.
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 to underline the ‘new’ in New Naturalist.
The prototype of the Butterflies jacket was a painting of September 1944. Twice the size of the printed jacket, the artists used gouache and watercolour paint on thick, rough-surfaced watercolour paper. At this stage the Ellises probably did not know that they would be restricted to four colours (including black).
Later the design was redrawn to the same size as the printed jacket in response to recommended printing requirements. Completed by January 1945, C&RE made a number of modifications, bringing the butterflies closer and making more of the distant trees and windmill. The blue was deepened to enable the title lettering to show more clearly. Perhaps few readers would have spotted that the orange colour enclosing the book’s number is the caterpillar’s defensive organ, known as an osmeterium.
William Collins had ‘asked a great many people about this jacket. He likes the original rough and the smaller redrawing of it’, Ruth Atkinson went on, ‘but has received a good deal of criticism at your using a Swallow-Tail which is a very rare butterfly in England I am told. He would like you to do the design again, using another butterfly – possibly the Dark Green Fretillary [sic]. Mr Collins hates to ask you to begin all over again but as we are quite definitely not using the design you finally submitted, I think it might be easier to suggest a third alternative for this title’ (RA to CE, 8.2.45).
The first submitted design for Butterflies with hand lettering on watercolour paper by C&RE, 1944. It is drawn half as large again as the printed jacket (37.2 x 31 cm).
Later jackets of Butterflies were printed using a screen to deepen the colours.
For the published jacket the Ellises made the butterflies and distant scene more prominent and redesigned the spine and colophon.
It seems, then, that there were three versions of the jacket design for the first New Naturalist, the original rough, the modified design drawn at jacket size, and a third version with the fritillary that C&RE produced and sent to Collins by February 1945. By then, however, Billy Collins had changed his mind and decided to stick with the Swallowtail design after all. He was now ‘absolutely happy’ about the jacket, and commented that he had personally ‘always liked the Swallow-Tail, and I hope you will do this. I do not think that the criticism