It has been a while since every second column in your broadsheet newspaper was blabbing about the nautical novels of Patrick O’Brian. He’s back. I am here to announce that I shall, for the foreseeable future, be buying no more new titles in the Aubrey-Maturin series. If I were a superhero nerd I would be dignifying this petty strop with the word “boycott”. But I’m not, so I won’t.
The problem is the covers. For most of the sequence’s long history the paperbacks have been wrapped in beautifully detailed paintings by Geoff Hunt. The artist didn’t come on board (ahem) until 1988 — 18 years after the first novel emerged — but he was quickly commissioned to deliver new covers for the earlier paperbacks and to paint covers for succeeding editions, right up to the last completed novel in 1999. They are a vital part of the briny experience.
Imagine my pathetic outrage when, then 14 novels into the full 20, I discovered the fifteenth decorated with a photo montage of a plank and what looks like a metal shackle. With no warning, the publisher has ditched Hunt for an entirely new design across all volumes. To be fair, it is a perfectly nice design. No criticism is directed at the graphics team.
I want a book cover to be as carefully considered as the contents ... It’s the first and last thing you see, and looking at it is a shortcut to thinking about the experience of reading the book, so it has to fit
But the novels are no longer what they were. The odd thing is they tried this once before. About 15 years ago, the series was reissued with covers featuring models photographed as characters from the stories. We sat those out and, after a few short years, Geoff was back.
From enchanted forests to winter wonderlands: 12 Christmas experiences to try around Ireland
Hidden by One Society restaurant review: Delightful Dublin neighbourhood spot with tasty food and keen prices
Gladiator II review: Don’t blame Paul Mescal but there’s no good reason for this jumbled sequel to exist
Paul Howard: I said I’d never love another dog as much as I loved Humphrey. I was wrong
The reading world is divided between those who care about covers (specifically paperback covers) and those who find this odder than worrying what packaging sausages come in. These are often the same people who can’t understand why anyone would keep a book they had already read. They regard the Kindle — other digital readers are available — as not just a convenient stand-in for the real thing when travelling, but also a wholly satisfactory replacement for paper, print, glue and Geoff Hunt. The rest of us see the book as an entity worth cherishing, even if we never get beyond the title page.
John Self, among our busiest and best literary critics, is surely in this latter camp. “I want a book cover to be as carefully considered as the contents,” he tells me. “It’s the first and last thing you see, and looking at it is a shortcut to thinking about the experience of reading the book, so it has to fit.”
It seems publishers don’t appreciate the power of their best designs
The Aubrey-Maturin series is not the only roman-fleuve to have been stripped of its outer identity. Mark Boxer came on late to Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, but his delightfully tart cartoons, on the covers for over 40 years, are — despite their recent replacement with a photographic design — still indelibly associated with those 12 volumes. For many, despite Simon Russell Beale’s fine performance in the 1997 TV series, the toxic Kenneth Widmerpool remains Boxer’s looming version on the covers of At Lady Molly’s and The Military Philosophers.
No paperback of Ulysses has had quite the iconic heft of the 1969 Penguin edition. Allowing just the words “James Joyce Ulysses” and the imprint’s avian logo to complicate a plain black front, the cover’s sparseness implicitly argued for the novel’s already axiomatic importance. It was seen, battered and foxed, within a thousand bulging corduroy pockets for decades to come.
At the other end of the market, Raymond Hawkey’s designs for the James Bond books — first published by Pan between 1963 and 1967 — have, despite constant reinvention, remained the most evocative of the spy’s high period. These were the montages that kicked off by stamping two physical holes in the model’s naked back on the first softback edition of Thunderball. Open the cover and you would find a brace of bullets.
“Look at the old Corgi paperback cover of Joseph Heller’s masterpiece Something Happened,” John Self adds. “Just a big fat exclamation mark, which sums it up perfectly. No cover since has worked quite so well.”
The book has survived. So has this tricky graphic art form. Talking to readers of all ages, I find there are still many who — sanely in my view — refuse to buy a novel when the film or TV “tie-in” version is the only one available. Picador’s decision to keep Jack Nicholson on the cover of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for decades surely scared off thousands of purists.
It seems publishers don’t appreciate the power of their best designs. As Self points out, it is vanishingly rare for record labels to change LP covers. You will always get Hipgnosis’s prism on Dark Side of the Moon. You will always get Andy Warhol’s banana on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Yet Geoff Hunt is currently missing from Patrick O’Brian.
Rig fore and main topgallants. We have the weather gauge. Set course for the nearest second-hand bookstore.
