posted on 13 Jul 2025

 

A first outing for a major illustrator, artist and author

Back in 2017 I wrote a review of exceedingly hard-to-find The Grass Beneath the Wire by John Pollock for this website and at the very end of it I said:

“The bonus of this book is the dust jacket – which is a striking black and white creation. It turns out that this is one of artist Posy Simmonds first commissions back when she was still an art student.”

Since writing that review the jacket has never been far from my mind – there is, I think, something daring and direct about it. When I say that the image is unsophisticated, I don’t use that word disparagingly – there’s a flatness in the faces and the hands are positively huge but the overall composition just feels balanced and evocative. And, most importantly of all, it’s a jacket that fits the contents of the book perfectly.

And then, not long ago, I picked up a copy of Paul Craven’s Posy Simmonds – a book in the excellent Thames & Hudson series, The Illustrators. And reading through that I was delighted to find that Simmonds uncovers much more about how this jacket came about – and how she made her debut as a book illustrator.

Born in 1945 with the first names Rosemary Elizabeth, Simmonds was always known in the family as Posy and she opted to focus on a potential career in commercial art when she decided to attend The Central School of Art and Design in London. She was still a student there when this first attempt at a book jacket design was picked up by the publisher Anthony Blond In 1966 and it resulted not just in her first pay-cheque but an important contact. Craven quotes her as saying:

“…the publisher Anthony Blond wrote me a cheque for £25 and I used it to open a bank account.”

As if to underline what I said about the jacket’s lack of sophistication, we can also discover in this same section of Craven’s book that she actually did the lettering on the front of the jacket herself using dry-transfer Letraset – which accounts for the fact that it is in her own words, ‘v. wonky’.

In 1968, the book jacket design, along with some other examples of her work caught the eye of the famous cartoonist, Mel Calman who made contact with her and offered to help her develop her career. It was the doorway she needed to working in newspapers and magazines – and the rest, as they say, is history.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, I associated Posy Simmonds primarily with the gentle (and sometimes not so gentle) satire of literary middle-class life in her comic strip for The Guardian newspaper, Mrs Weber’s Diary – which was a weekly must-read at the time. I was, by and large, unaware of the breadth and scope of her other work (her children’s book illustration, for example, is a delight) and the way she was helping to redefine how the comic strip could be taken seriously by adult readers. Her more recent work in this field – Gemma Bovery, Tamara Drewe and Cassandra Darke – demonstrate just how sophisticated her illustrated serials have become and which have anticipated the rise and rise of the graphic novel.

However, despite having become a prolific and hugely talented artist and illustrator, I’m drawn back to that first book jacket as something that might only have been possible for someone not loaded down with rules and expectations and free to let a natural artistic instinct steer the creative process.

 

Terry Potter

July 2025