These images are of lots from the same auction as I blogged about a few days ago. A vast collection of jackets only for some fabulous books. I found them because I have been looking into the work of Hans Tisdall, an artists, muralist and illustrator from the middle of last century and a lot of these are his work. He was born in Munich in 1910 to an artist father and an Irish mother, "I drank with my mother's milk the commotion of artists and racketeering". In the late 1920s he was in Paris coming under the influence of Picasso and the Russian sculptor Moisey Keegan. By 1930 he was in London and after three days at an advertising agency decided he was going to be an artist. His studio was next door to Duncan Grant's in Bloomsbury and though he liked the man, Tisdall wasn't much influenced by the Bloomsbury Group. In the thirties he became well known as a designer of fabrics and his work as a muralist was beginning to take off. His association with Jonathan Cape through the 40s-60s was a long and productive one and I have no idea how many jackets he must have been responsible for, not all of them signed but all quite distinctive if only for the very individual text forms he developed. There were other publisher's too but Cape produced by far the largest number of his designs. He died in 1997.
