Cover of the Week: The World My Wilderness by Rose Macaulay
Penguin (1958) Cover artist Derrick Harris
Who reads Rose Macaulay now? I’ll tell you who: readers who enjoy great writing, brimming with ideas and social criticism, and focused stories with women as central characters. Born in Victorian England, she lived through two world wars and used writing to understand the extraordinary changes in her world.
She is best known for her novel The Towers of Trebizond (1956), a story of eccentric people traveling from Istanbul to Trebizond, Turkey. It is a wonderful novel and well worth reading.
My favorite novel is The World My Wilderness published in 1950. It is the story of a mother and her sons/daughters in post-war London. The story is dark, gritty, and very funny. Macaulay is also a great observer of landscape (one of my favorite things in her writing). You feel as if you there in every location of the novel.
Penguin reprinted this superb novel in 1958 with a perfect cover designed by artist Derrick Harris. A woodcut illustration catches exactly the right tone of the novel. You also get a sense that the story will visit areas of London that aren’t that well-known (at the time) with weeks and flowers interspersed with rotundas in the city.
Penguin color-coded their books to make it easier for buyers to find the book they want:
Red = Drama
Orange = Fiction
Yellow = Miscellaneous
Green = Crime Fiction
Dark Blue = Autobiographies
Purple = Essays
Cerise = Travel and Adventure
Grey = World Affairs
It also took a long time for Penguin to put illustrations on their covers. I guess they wanted their books to look uniform or something. At any rate, orange was the color for fiction and the designer of The World My Wilderness used that color to design images that would stand out (Black/Gray) against the orange required in the design.
More info on Rose Macaulay is here. I recommend the Virago Press edition of The World My Wilderness as the one to buy. The Folio Society has an excellent write-up on Derrick Harris at this address.
Always loved those old Penguins. My great-aunt had color-coded bookshelves - the one on the landing outside the bathroom was all greenbacks. Right by the front door were the orange ones. Blue in the hall between the living room and dining room, and so on.
Oh, great! Thank you for the recommendation. There is something so fantastic about the early designs of Penguin paperback books. I can't resist them when I travel through a used bookstore somewhere in the world. They are truly beautiful books to hold.