Here’s a superb image from Finn Dean, the winner of this year’s Book Illustration Competition. His designs will be published as The Folio Society’s edition of Brave New World in September. It’s fascinating to look at the future from the thirties and forties, and see how emotional detachment is a key feature. While Brave New … Continue reading Brave new dystopia
A textile produced in the early 1950s for Edinburgh Weavers by Marian Mahler… it’s actually a notebook from the V&A. Don’t think there could be a better evocation of a particular type of countryside. Continue reading Fifties landscape
I was born in a small town not far from the New Forest. Now and again in the evenings, as a family, we would go and watch the deer from a viewing platform. It was like theatre, and we were in the dress circle, looking with binoculars at a sun-dappled herd lazing under a canopy … Continue reading After London: dreaming Wild England
This is one of a series of photography books by S W Colyer produced in the late 1930s and during the war, each featuring a different English landscape. They’re described as photogravure plates, so each image has quite a lot of depth and looks quite cinematic – a great insight into a time when it … Continue reading Dorset in 1940
Photos taken on holiday around Aran Fawddwy in Wales. The inside of the farm outbuilding looked like a scene from the last century, not ours – I didn’t see how a book that looked pre-war would still be sat there, as dry and clean as if it was on a kitchen table, twined with a … Continue reading Survivors
I love H E Bates. His short stories are perfect examples of drowsy, bee-filled summers or glowing winter afternoons, and full of bittersweet melancholia not unlike Hardy shorn of some melodrama. Incredibly prolific and versatile (which, along with The Darling Buds of May is probably a reason why he’s not allowed to be admitted as … Continue reading H E Bates and the paperback cover
WHISTLES IN THE WIND 