LOVED COVERS No. 22:

In 1967, I worked for a few years at an American design consultancy that had arrived from Cincinnati in the early sixties to set up in "Swinging London", as it was then known. Also, by then, I was regularly getting freelance book cover design work from several London-based publishers. So, I was feeling chipper, having just married and purchased my first house. While browsing covers in Hatchards, my go-to bookshop, just five minutes away from the consultancy, I became transfixed by the cover shown with its enlarged rail ticket and punched hole revealing the die-stamped author and title on the black binding case. Nicholas Thirkell designed it, and I knew he was working at Macmillan as their art director. I have never been backwards about approaching designers whose work I admired, so I made a b-line for Thirkell, a quinicental public school gentleman, tall, quietly spoken, modest and difficult to fathom. He became another publishing client, and just a year later, in 1968, I left the American design consultancy and became the art director of William Heinemann based in Queens Street Mayfair and later on to William Collins (Fontana). It became a wonderful decade in the publishing world. Nineteen years after that original meeting with Nicholas in the 1960s, he became a partner in my consultancy, Carroll, Dempsey & Thirkell (CDT), in 1986. He sadly died in 2022.