Penguin Books – Literary Art and Illustration

The Wind From Nowhere, by J.G. Ballard – April, 1974 (October, 1959 / February, 1961) [David Pelham]

“The wind came from nowhere … a super-hurricane that blasted round the globe at hundreds of miles per hour burying whole communities beneath piles of rubble, destroying all organized life and driving those it did not kill to seek safety in tunnels and sewers – where they turned against each other in their desperate struggle to survive …”

When in 1974 Penguin Books published J.G. Ballard’s novels The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Terminal Beach, the cover artist for each volume was David Pelham, who served as Art Director at Penguin from 1968 to 1979.

All four covers share the same style: A central object – an army tank; a building; a nuclear bomb (“fat-man”, to be specific); an automobile (well, at least the tail fins of an automobile!) – is rendered in almost photographic crispness as the central object of the composition, yet simplified to such an extent that minor technical details, surface textures, and the “dings and dents” and imperfections natural to any well-used man-made object are entirely absent.

And… The objects are rendered in shades of yellow, orange, and red, utterly and deliberately unlike their actual colors. The color shading of each (for example, take a close look at the tank turret, below…) it looks as if much of the painting was done via airbrush.

And yet… That’s all there is. Other than backgrounds in shades of violet, orange, and blue, there’s nothing else. No people; no background scenery; no spacecraft; no planets, stars, or galaxies floating in the distance.

And even more… The “objects” are positioned in each painting in a position that symbolizes the obsolescence, powerlessness, and irrelevancy of man’s technical and architectural creations, in a world of impersonal forces transcending human understanding and control.

Look at the cover below. It shows a British Centurion main battle tank (to be specific, an early version of the tank), of about 52 tons weight, the design of which dates back to the mid 1940s. And yet, it’s suspended in space, tossed in mid-air, irrelevantly leaf-like, very much by The Wind From Nowhere.

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To give you a clearer idea, here’s a nicely done scale model of a Centurion tank, showing how closely Pelham followed the actual vehicle’s design and shape, and his simplification or removal of small details. Well, this image also gives you a nice view of the “top” of the tank, too!

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The book’s rear cover. All four 1974 Penguin books feature an explanatory blurb, a Penguin penguin set on a purple oval, and nothing else. No excerpts; no reviewer’s quotes; no plugs for other books. Simple and stark, like the front cover.

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You can view the cover art of Penguin’s other 1974 editions of Ballard’s work at David Pelham: The Art of Inner Space (from 2012), where Pelham discusses working with J.G. Ballard, influences on his cover designs, and aspects of working at Penguin.

You can view the visual influences on the other three 1974 covers at the links below:

The Drought – Inspired by Cadillac Ranch (April, 1974)

The Drowned World – Inspired by Chrysler Building in New York City (1974)

The Terminal Beach – Inspired by “Fat Man” atomic bomb (plutonium implosion weapon) (1974)

Plus… Also from The Art of Inner Space, here Pelham’s design for the SlipCase for Penguin’s Boxed set of Ballard’s four novels. Continuing with a theme of technology juxtaposed against the natural world (note that the plane isn’t just embedded in the earth, the port wing is broken, too!), the cover “object” is a “beached” American B-29 Superfortress very heavy WW II bomber. Interestingly, the plane’s insignia are an accurate representation (except for the nose art) of the striped tail markings of a B-29 of the 45th Bomb Squadron, 40th Bomb Group, 20th Air Force, the “Eddie Allen”, which bore tail letter “M”.

(Atomic bomb? Centurion tank? B-29 Superfortress Pelham seems to have had an intriguing focus on military technology!)

Here’s the real “Eddie Allen”, serial number 42-24578, in flight, in Army Air Force Photograph 75743AC / A45756).

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And, a painting of “Eddie Allen” during a bombing mission, from the flickr photostream of Robert Sullivan.

References

Biography of James G. Ballard, at Wikipedia

The Wind From Nowhere, at Wikipedia

David Pelham: The Art of Inner Space, at Ballardian

Cover Illustrations by David Pelham, at Science Fiction Book Art

Centurion Tank, at Wikipedia

Centurion Tank, at Tank Nut Dave

Tamiya 1/35 Centurion Mk III Tank (plastic model), at IModeler

Almayer’s Folly, by Joseph Conrad – 1947 (1895) [Robert Jonas]

Here is Penguin Books’ 1947 edition of Joseph Conrad’s first novel…

Though the portrait of Conrad on the book’s rear cover is undated, in terms of his general appearance and style of dress, the image is similar to Alvin Langdon Coburn’s photogravure of March 11, 1916 (at bottom), as seen in Conrad’s Wikipedia profile.

References

Joseph Conrad, at Wikipedia

Joseph Conrad, Alvin Langdon Coburn photogravure of March 11, 1916, from New York Public Library Digital Collection (Item 297498): “The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “Joseph Conrad, London, March 11th, 1916.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1922.”

Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson – 1946 [Robert Jonas]

It will perhaps be somewhat difficult for the men and women of a later day
to understand Jesse Bentley.
In the Last fifty years a vast change has taken place in the lives of our people.
A revolution has in fact taken place.
The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs,
the shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us from over seas,
the going and coming of trains,
the growth of cities,
the building of the interurban car lines
that weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses,
and now in these later days the coming of the automobiles
has worked a tremendous change in the lives and the habits
of thought of our people of Mid-America.

Books,
badly imagined and written though they may be in the hurry of our times,
are in every household,
magazines circulate by the millions of copies,
newspapers are everywhere.
In our day a farmer standing by a stove in the store in his village
has his mind filled to overflowing with the words of other men.
The newspapers and the magazines have pumped him full.
Much of the old brutal ignorance that had in it also
a kind of beautiful childlike innocence is gone forever.
The farmer by the stove is brother to the men of the cities,
and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and senselessly
as the best city man of us all.

Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi – 1948 [Robert Jonas]

The truth is that the internecine war among the gentry is the same in every village of Lucania.

The upper classes have not the means to live with decorum and self-respect.

The young men of promise, and even those barely able to make their way, leave the village.

The most adventurous go off to America, as the peasants do, and the others to Naples or Rome; none return.

Those who are left in the villages are the discarded, who have no talents, the physically deformed, the inept and the lazy; greed and boredom combine to dispose them to evil.

Small parcels of farm land do not assure them a living and, in order to survive, these misfits must dominate the peasants and secure for themselves the well-paid posts of druggist, priest, marshal of the carabinieri, and so on.

It is, therefore, a matter of life and death to have the rule in their own hands, to hoist themselves on their relatives and friends into top jobs.

This is the root of the endless struggle to obtain power and to keep it from others, a struggle with the narrowness of their surroundings, enforced idleness, and a mixture of personal and political motives render continuous and savage.

Every day anonymous letters from every village of Lucania arrived at the prefecture.

And at the prefecture they were, apparently, far from dissatisfied with this state of affairs, even if they said the contrary.

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All that people say about the people of the South, things I once believed myself: the savage rigidity or their morals, their Oriental jealousy, the fierce sense of honor leading to crimes of passion and revenge, all these are but myths.

Perhaps they existed a long time ago and something of them is left in the way of a stiff conventionality.

But emigration has changed the picture.

The men have gone and the women have taken over.

Many a woman’s husband is in America.

For a year, or even two, he writes to her, then he drops out of her ken, perhaps he forms other family ties; in any case he disappears and never comes back.

The wife waits for him a year, or even two; then some opportunity arises and a baby is the result.

A great part of the children are illegitimate, and the mother holds absolute sway. Gagliano has twelve hundred inhabitants, and there are two thousand men from Gagliano in America.

Grassano had five thousand inhabitants and almost the same number have emigrated.

In the villages the women outnumber the men and the father’s identity is no longer so strictly important; honor is dissociated from paternity, because a matriarchal regime prevails.

Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara – 1934 (1945) [Unknown artist]

When Caroline Walker fell in love with Julian English she was a little tired of him.
That was in the summer of 1926,
one of the most unimportant years in the history of the united States,
and the year in which Caroline Walker was sure
her life had reached a pinnacle of uselessness.

She was four years out of college then,
and she was twenty-seven years old,
which is as old as anyone ever gets,
or at least she thought so at the time.

She found herself thinking more and more and less and less of men.
That is the way she put it, and she knew it to be sure and right,
but she did not bother to expand the -ism.

“I think of them oftener, and I think of them less often.”
She had attained varying degrees of love, requited and unrequited –
but seldom the latter.