From Bloomsbury to the Downs

Celebrating Batsford books

Bradley Thomas Batsford opened his doors as a London bookseller in 1843 and by the end of the century was one of this country’s most prominent publishers. B. T. Batsford was a family firm, steered in those early decades by its founder and his three sons, who built up a reputation as general publishers with a particular strength in architecture and the arts. These were the subjects that they became particularly known for, although their list was strong in other areas, from science to theology (many of the early customers in the bookshop were clergymen). The expertise in selecting and reproducing illustrations that they developed for their books on the arts continued to grow in the 20th century, when they produced many striking and popular illustrated books on history, arts, crafts, architecture, and, at the junction of all these subjects, the heritage of the British Isles.*

Batsford was also notable for producing series of books that readers wanted to collect – the Batsford Heritage Series (begun in the 1930s) and the Face of Britain Series (starting during World War II) were pivotal. Batsford chose knowledgeable and often excellent authors for the books – in the Face of Britain Series you can find W. G. Hoskins writing about Midland England, M. W. Barley on Lincolnshire and the Fens, and Richard Wyndham on Southeast England. Another Batsford favourite of mine, is John Russell’s Shakespeare’s Country – it wasn’t published under the banner ‘The Face of Britain’ but is similar in format.

These series were instantly recognisable because they had covers illustrated in colour (in itself a stand-out feature back then) with distinctive cover artwork by Brian Cook, Bradley Thomas Batsford’s grandson and therefore the third generation in the family firm.† Brian Cook created a style that was boldly simple, and brightly coloured: were any book jackets back then as bright and colourful as his? Very few, I’d guess. To print them, he used the Jean Berté process, which employs water-based colours and rubber printing plates, one per colour, into which the artist cuts the design.§ In the right hands, the results are stunning, and books with Cook’s jackets are prized by collectors. I have a whole shelf of them, but most of mine are quite badly faded (as this was a watercolour process, the inks fade in the light). Catching sight of one that has preserved its originally vivid palette is like being warmed by a ray of sunshine from another age.¶

The long history of Batsford, from those beginnings as a bookseller to the name’s current life as an imprint of Pavilion Books (still producing good books, in artistic and historical subjects especially) is charted in a small exhibition currently in Holborn Library, Theobalds Road. It’s good to see the imprint commemorated in this way and if you’re near that part of London the exhibition is worth a look.‡

There have been other celebrations. A notable one, which also marks 80 years since the outbreak of World War II, is a reprint of one of the Face of Britain series with a Brian Cook illustration on the cover. This is the volume originally called Southeastern Survey, by Richard Wyndham. It has been reissued this year with a new title, Sussex, Kent & Surrey 1939, with an introduction by Peter Ashley. Wyndham’s text is one of the better ones in the series and, written in 1939 and published in 1940, it marks that moment when the war began and people increasingly reached for books about the Britain they were fighting for. All of Britain was vulnerable of course, but these counties close to London felt that vulnerability as much as any. And books about England had another urgency. The war made foreign travel impossible for most, and few inland journeys were undertaken lightly. Authors like Wyndham reminded people what they’d got, and what, on these brief journeys, they might see.

The author, designer and photographer Peter Ashley, who’ll be no stranger to many readers of this blog, is an excellent person to introduce the book. Peter is a Batsford collector and is knowledgeable both about England’s places and the books that have described them. I’ll certainly be shelving a brightly covered copy next to my faded first edition of the book: it’s a worthy companion.

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* Quite early in my life I realised that the books on English historic architecture I was taking out of the local library to inform and develop my new interest were published by Batsford: in the 1960s, they were dominating the field.

† Brian Cook changed his name to Brian Batsford Cook, adopting his mother’s maiden name to emphasize his family connection to the firm.

§ The French printer Jean Berté (1883–1981) patented his method in 1926, so Cook was on to something quite new when he started using the Jean Berté process soon after 1930.

¶ For more on the early history of Batsford, see Hector Bolitho, A Batsford Century (B. T. Batsford, 1943)

‡ Batsford: 175 Years of a Bloomsbury Publisher is at Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre, Holborn Library, Theobalds Road, until 28 June.

The top image is Brian Cook’s depiction of Kersey, Suffolk, for The Villages of England (Batsford, 1932).

Rochester, Kent, etc

The going down of the sun: Illustrations of the month

I have to say I was only vaguely aware of the illustrator John Mansbridge before I found a secondhand copy of one of the children’s books he illustrated for the publisher Batsford. It was Castles, part of Batsford’s Junior Heritage series, with illustrations by Mansbridge and text by R. Allen Brown. The volume was one of a short series and I’ve since acquired others on Abbeys and Churches. The pictures are lively and colourful, and mix imaginative reconstruction with more academic elements such as floor plans and cross-sections in a way I still find engaging. It struck me, as a looked through them, that if I’d been given such books as a child I’d have latched on to the joys of architecture even sooner than I did.

John Mansbridge (1901–81) was born in London. His parents were Albert Mansbridge and his wife Frances (née Pringle), founders of the Workers’ Educational Association, the starting funds of which were famously 2s 6d from Frances’s housekeeping money. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and the Slade, established himself as a portrait painter (he painted the first Labour cabinet of 1924), produced posters for London Transport, and became a member of staff at Goldsmith’s College of Art in 1929. During World War II he was an official war artist, working on camouflage as well as producing portraits of those serving in the RAF. After the war he continued to paint and work at Goldsmith’s, where he became head of Fine Art, as well as producing many book illustrations. He had more than a passing interest in architecture, teaching the subject for the WEA and, after some ten years of research, producing a successful Graphic History of Architecture.

Many of the illustrations in the Castles volume combine several elements including realistic drawings of castles, floor plans, architectural details, additional contextual motifs such as pieces of heraldry, and textual material, often integrated into the architecture. So in this example of a group of great towers, the labels wind their way around interlaced arches, and the larger coloured lettering at the bottom is superimposed on the square and compasses, the symbolic tools of the mason. The castles are not shown in great detail, but Mansbridge’s combination of grey shading and pale coloured wash gives a sense of their mass and overall form – which in turn shows the variety of ways in which castle-builders designed keeps. He manages to cram a lot of information into a single, coherent page. The strong directional lighting, throwing into relief Gothic arches and ruined walls, gives an added sense of drama.

But it can all get much more exciting than this, as in my second example, a double-page spread depiction of siege warfare in full swing. Men at arms, their shields on their backs so that they look like beetles, swarm up a siege tower, catapults and similar engines are at work, and the air is thick with crossbow bolts. Fire has already taken hold in the background. And the more you look, the more seems to be going on – missiles flying through the air, defending swordsmen being felled, attackers getting pushed off their scaling ladders as they attempt to take the gatehouse, other attackers straining to operate the machinery of the catapult. The sun is going down on the horizon, but they’re not going to stop now.

This action-packed illustration is achieved using black and just one other colour – an economy imposed, no doubt, by the publisher's budget, but a challenge to which Mansbridge responded with apparent enthusiasm. He manages to tell us quite a bit about siege warfare, but does not flinch from the horror and sheer frantic confusion of battle either. Another and more profound lesson, perhaps, for the book’s original young readers.

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Please click on the illustrations to enlarge them

More of the illustrations from Castles are online here.

John Russell

Thank you (3)

I don’t keep up with the obituaries enough these days, so was saddened recently to read about the death of the art critic John Russell in August 2008. John Russell was born in 1919, went to St Paul's School and Magdalen College, Oxford, and in 1940 went to work as an unpaid ‘attaché’ at the Tate Gallery. The gallery’s pictures and staff were evacuated to Worcestershire soon after Russell arrived, and the young man soon found himself called up, first to the Ministry of Information and then to Naval Intelligence, where he met Ian Fleming.

Russell’s time in Worcestershire must have helped him write his first book, Shakespeare’s Country, for Batsford. His encounter with the creator of James Bond bore fruit after the war, when Fleming introduced him to the Sunday Times, where Russell became Art Critic in 1949. In 1974 he moved to the USA, to work for the New York Times, which he did for many years. He did many other things too, curating exhibitions, writing books (including excellent ones on Seurat and Francis Bacon), and writing for television and film.

I first read John Russell in the Sunday Times in the late 1960s where, week by week, he introduced me to modern art – big beasts like Moore and Bacon, younger artists such as Hockney and Hodgkin. I also read Shakespeare’s Country, because I lived on the edge of it. At first I didn’t realise it was by the man I was reading in the paper every week – the book seemed backward-looking whereas the weekly art reviews presented the new with all its shocks. But then the books of regional travel and history that Batsford published during the Second World War were precisely designed to look back in order to remind people what they were fighting for. At the Sunday Times Russell was engaging in different kinds of looking – whether casting backward glances at the career of Picasso or assessments of everything from Pop Art to Joseph Beuys. Most of his writing, though, was thoughtful, insightful, and appreciative – he liked best to write about what he best liked.

When I first read Shakespeare’s Country, I found the writing rather mannered: the book has a tendency to compare places in England to more glamorous ones overseas, so that the countryside resembles the Italian campagna or a town is like Auteuil. But such comparisons are meant to reassure the 1940s reader that the short journeys then possible could yield pleasures equal to those of grander continental tourism. And I was grateful to be introduced to such pleasures - the isolated church at Strensham, for example, with its chancel full of monuments,romantic and deserted country houses, the backstreets of faded, elegant Cheltenham. It is the territory, of course, of this blog. I came to see too that Russell's style was not always mannered, and that he was at pains to show that writing about places and buildings, though it might look back, did not have to be deadeningly nostalgic, or wallowingly indulgent; that it could embody precision, and impart interesting and useful information. That it could be the result of interested enquiry and that it could provoke further enquiry in the reader. And that it did not have to be, as Russell himself put it, reliant on ‘the strange sexual-anthropomorphic idiom of English country-writers, in which villages nestle, valleys girdle, and rivers are said to have issue’.

And so it was that John Russell fired my growing interest in buildings – their history and context as well as their architecture, starting balls rolling that are still in motion. And that he also helped me to find what I could like in art, and how I might understand it. And above all that criticism isn’t always about, or even primarily about, demolishing things – it can also be about taking them apart to show how they work and why you like them.

For starting me off, and keeping me going, thank you, John Russell.