Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover
We recently inherited a box full of old books after Shana’s mother retired to a new life on the Costa Packet in Spain. Although we probably won’t read many (or any) of them — they’re mostly children’s books from the 1950s — they don’t take up much room, so we shall most likely keep them. And some of the cover illustrations are interesting, similar to comic-book graphics in style, with fresh colours and clean lines…
Oh, why don’t I just admit it: I don’t really know much about art, although I am rather keen on The Haywain, so you have to credit me with at least some taste. But I have decided — we have both decided — that these book jacket illustrations are worth seeing, even if, in some cases, just for their amusement value. (By the way, if you like your pictures big — not excessively big though — just click on the thumbnail images and you will be duly rewarded.)
The first book, First Act, by Martha Robinson, was illustrated by Ley Kenyon. Ring any bells? Well, Kenyon was a professional artist between the wars. He was captured by the Germans and continued to paint on scraps of paper from the Red Cross parcels. His artistic skills eventually led to his being recruited as a document forger for the Allied Prisoners’ escape committee. And Kenyon was played by Donald Pleasance in The Great Escape.
[There will now be a short interlude while we all join together in whistling the theme to The Great Escape.]
Kenyon, who died in 1991, also apparently taught Prince Philip to scuba dive.
Our second offering is the cover of The Silent House, by Rita Coatts. Open the book and things get even more exciting when you see that the full title is The Silent House That Held A Secret! (The exclamation mark is not my attempt to hype things up: it is actually in the title.) This one is illustrated by W. Lindsay Cable. Cable was a well-known children’s book illustrator in the 1940s. He did, among other things, the artwork for several of Enid Blyton’s books. But it is for British propaganda leaflets that Cable is also famous, most notably for his pictures of Ahmad and Johnny, which were widely distributed in Egypt during World War 2.
Further reading: