Fontana Modern Masters

[imomus]

Yesterday I happened to be looking through the Motto Distribution blog when I came across this picture of a double-page spread in a volume called The Reader:



I immediately recognised in this work -- I think it's by Ruth Höflich, a London-based German artist who works with books and libraries -- a couple of abstracted versions of covers from the original 1970s Fontana Modern Masters.



Fontana Modern Masters was a series of pocket guides to artists, writers, philosophers, sociologists and other thinkers published by Fontana paperbacks. The series, edited by Frank Kermode, began in 1970. I don't know who designed the covers, which featured Helvetica Rounded Bold type and brightly-coloured abstract blocks of pop colour indebted to the paintings of Frank Stella and Josef Albers. [Update: the covers use the paintings of Oliver Bevan.]



The luridly elegant original Fontana Modern Masters were still very current when I became a student in the late 70s. I bought several of them. I liked how the series worked as a kind of cross-disciplinary hagiography; these "masters" were saints, yet cool too. Mostly leftish, the books were also a kind of radical chic. And they offered the sort of collectable, generic, same-but-different appeal as Merve Verlag, for example, offers today.



The series also offered some weird juxtapositions. What on earth could the master of relativity have in common with the "high priest of love"? Well, simply that they were both "modern masters"; one described orgasms, the other helped split the atom. Both presided over modernity, and both deserved funky Modernist covers and a paperback book.



If you're a bit of an aspie you might want to spend hours working out whether some kind of system exists to relate one jacket to another. The relationship between the Joyce and McLuhan covers, for instance, shouldn't tax anyone used to a certain kind of IQ test question. To turn Joyce into McLuhan, clearly, you just rotate 180 degrees and, er, change the colours.



I think my favourite covers are the ones that drop a stark, jagged shape onto a white background, like these ones for Melanie Klein and Jean-Paul Sartre.



It's not surprising that these covers -- inspired design, inspired by art -- have inspired artists in their turn. In 2005 Jamie Shovlin had a show at Riflemaker Gallery in London entitled Fontana Modern Masters, a "remaking of the Fontana / Collins paperback 'modern thinkers' series of the seventies. Hard-edged, 'systems' graphics were converted into soft lyrical watercolours", said the Riflemaker blurb.



Like me, Shovlin seems to like the white-background covers better than the bled, blocky ones. I like how he's let the solid, sharp blobs of colour dribble, bringing attention to the handmade, liquid quality of his watercolour approximations.

You'll notice that Shovlin has left the titles off some of the books. Anything which Fontana actually published, Shovlin depicts without its title. Books which Fontana announced but didn't publish, he's painted as he thinks they would have looked: "Shovlin set about constructing a system – set out in the Fontana Colour Chart – which would allow him to ‘accurately’ produce the covers of the books which Fontana had announced it was to publish but which, for whatever reason, had never appeared. Thus the existing books were analysed, and the colours used in the cover designs were assigned values derived from the percentage of space they occupied, the percentages being taken from the intellectual ‘score’ of each ‘Modern Master’ (a total arrived at by a series of seemingly arbitrary criteria). Working from the covers of the existing books Shovlin was therefore able to extrapolate the appearance of non-existent books about such heavyweights as Adorno and Lacan."



In the end, Shovlin made 58 Fontana watercolours representing the 48 existing titles in the series and his versions of what the ten ‘lost’ titles might've looked like.



Shovlin may be poking fun at "the notion of objective research methodology, especially in its application to 'useless' information", but it's unlikely anyone will be inspired to make a similar homage to the Fontana Modern Masters covers which followed the first series. In the 1980s the design took a precipitous tumble, opting for silly line drawings of the thinkers. And in the 90s we got this incredibly ugly and conservative look:



It's tempting to say that the collapse in design standards witnessed by Fontana Modern Masters since the 1970s represents the decline of Britain itself -- as the island swung right, sharp paperbacks making the ideas of György Lukács accessible to a wider, funkier public were replaced (by Rupert Murdoch-owned media conglomerates) by dull textbooks whose covers seemed to scream: "DEAD WHITE MALE!"

Or were these thinkers always dead white males, and did the pop-minimalist covers merely dress them up, for a decade or so, in the spurious glamour of orgasmic colour -- like putting mini-skirts on Action Man dolls? Certainly had me fooled.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

My friend collects the Fontana Modern Masters and puts pictures of them on her Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=book&w=34043743%40N00). I didn't know what the series was called before now!

[(Anonymous)]

But what does "the collapse of design standards" really mean? I mean, I'm basically with you aesthetically - the 1970s designs look cool, the 80s ones look terrible and I'd probably be a little less harsh on the 90s ones although they're not wonderful. But I do remember a time in the 80s when those Stella-ish designs looked very boring and passé. It was the 70s institutional look. And now it's come back, the retro-modernist look is back. It's so subjective and cyclical that it's impossible to talk about some sort of collapse of standards - that's just feeding into a "good old days" mentality.

[(Anonymous)]

When Marx took the picture of himself with a wild beard and stern gaze it was something of a joke, a picture for his daughters, playing with the idea of the giant(and just before he cut off most of his hair, actually). This kind of irony is generally lost, and the people in the pictures become inaccessible (an exception would be Einstein)

70s fontanas are nice, because they don't foster the "dead white males" club. Sure, fontana might choose men, but they don't play on or strengthen misconceptions about philosophers needing to be men (old bearded men, no less).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Excellent, she's got Trotsky! This is like collecting bubblegum cards! Yay!

[(Anonymous)]

Then again, there's something rather masculine about sharp lines and geometry, isn't there?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Melanie Klein was, I think, the only woman in the series. But I think leaving off the first name and any imagery of the person does remove gender from the equation, in a kind of brain-in-a-jar way.

If sharp lines and geometry signify maleness, bright colours signify femaleness in our culture, so that's pretty much offset.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, you're with me aesthetically, so the "good old days" mentality is intersubjective, which is the closest we can get, aesthetically, to objective.

[(Anonymous)]

No, I don't share your "good old days" mentality. There may well come a day when the line drawings of the eighties will look cool in some sort of retro way. To talk about the "collapse of design standards" is to use the same sort of supposedly objective language as in the "collapse of the newspaper industry" or a "fall in standards" in GCSE exams or something. That's what's wrong with the idea. The idea that there are "standards" in design is spurious.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'll agree with you that "collapse in design standards" is an insufficiently relativistic phrase. Ultimately I am, like you, a relativist. But the fact remains that almost nobody versed in design would, at this point, rank the 80s or 90s FMM sleeves above the 70s ones. It would be tantamount to design insanity, or it would just be trolling.

So again I'd say that objectivity in aesthetic matters is impossible, and that intersubjectivity -- ie consensus -- is the closest we're going to get.

[(Anonymous)]

No doubt we're basically in agreement.

Actually, I can sort of cock my head and look at those eighties covers and imagine them cool. I can see them coming back in, and the Stella-ish ones deemed too mainstream-y design. In about two years' time...

[loveishappiness.livejournal.com]

The ones from the 90s are not nice. That photo over a photo look used to be so ubiquitous. Not only that, but I bet the 90s editions are very large in comparison. Somewhere close to A5 instead of the pocket sized originals. So if the covers scream "DEAD WHITE MALE!" the size screams "LEAVE ME ON THE SHELF!"

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh come on, they've made Karl Marx look like a fucking sheepdog begging for a biscuit!

[litle-eglantine.livejournal.com]

My favourite, and the only one I owned, was Frantz Fanon by David Caute. He wasn't a white male... though he was dead.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think the Helvetica Rounded Bold looks that great, to be honest. It clashes with the otherwise sharp lines of the design.

Top Marx?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

[imomus.livejournal.com]

All the others mix italics with uprights, handwriting with type, and serif with sans serif in really inexcusable ways, though (see below). I think the Helvetica makes a beautiful energy with the angular coloured shapes and spaces around it.

Re: Top Marx?

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, there's no doubt which is the best Marx here. I still think it would look slightly better with standard Helvetica.

The nineties cover is really exemplary of how they mixed different typefaces in the late eighties and early nineties (I'm guessing it just became technically easier to do it at that point). Did The Face pioneer this? Then there was the Guardian with its italic "The". Very messy stylistically.

Re: Top Marx?

[deadbatteries.livejournal.com]

1) 70s, 2) 80s, 3) 90s

yes, a decline. i kind of like the 80s one, though, since marx has a funny expression on his face, as if saying - "i've been letting my hair grow out to fulfill my dream of becoming a forest bear (クMA)." it might also be a better fit in a floral wallpapered room with cookies & tea.

Re: Top Marx?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Going from one decade to another (as measured by these sleeves) is as radical as going from one country to another. And as someone who's moved from country to country, from decade to decade, I'll readily acknowledge that I might be trying to stay in the "country" represented by the sleeve on the left. Whenever I notice a nation repackaging its values and beliefs into something resembling the ones in the middle or on the right, I move. Not in order to make the scenery radically different, but to keep it radically the same.

Re: Top Marx?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You know, there's something a teensy bit 23 Envelope (http://hyggelig.sakura.ne.jp/4ad-faq/art.html) about the 90s jacket. As someone signed to 4AD (though I turned down the Oliver / Grierson sleeve they offered) I feel a bit responsible. I can only apologize!

Re: Top Marx?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

it might also be a better fit in a floral wallpapered room with cookies & tea.

See, this kept coming up when I was looking at students' work in Oslo last week. I was inclined to say "Your ostrich paintings are hideous / Your song is derivative of Cocorosie." But when the students explained these elements were "part of an installation / part of a performance" I said "Oh, that changes everything! Go ahead!"

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, anon, when were you born?

I was born in '81 and in the mid to late 80s, when I really first became aware of such things, I remember that everyone considered the popular face of the 70s--disco, bellbottoms, etc--outrageously uncool. I definitely absorbed this attitude enough that the beginnings of 70s revivalism that happened in the 90s felt genuinely subversive to me, and yet even as a child I was always extremely drawn to the abstract expressionist designs on my parents' old textbooks from that era. Far from seeming stodgy or institutional, the abstract designs on books about perfectly concrete subjects like physics gave them a kind of mysterious air, as though they were some kind of mid-century modernist/rationalist grimoire.

I do love a lot of design from the 80s, but I can't honestly foresee those specific books ever having that level of charm, at least not until the 20th century as a whole goes decidedly out of fashion; at that point, the lack of any real period-specific features might be a benefit to them. It might be easier to argue for their present or eventual appeal if the line drawings of Marx and Derrida had been dolled up with a bit of water coloring; it would lend them the same kind of incongruous chic-ness as the luridly colored books of the 70s, but in a more distinctly 80s kind of way.

Re: Top Marx?

[(Anonymous)]

What do you think are the best and worst of your sleeves?

Re: Top Marx?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I actually really like all the Momus sleeves from this decade (Florian Perret's Folktronic and Oskar Tennis Champion sleeves, James Goggin's Otto Spooky and Ocky Milk, Stefan Sadler's Joemus). The ones I dislike are the Happy Family album, Don't Stop The Night, Monsters of Love and The Ultraconformist. Nothing against the individual designers (me, Vici Macdonald, Thomi Wroblewski and Mike Alway respectively), because other sleeves they made (Poison Boyfriend, Tender Pervert, Travels with a Donkey) rank amongst the best.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Momus -

What do you think about the Vintage Books cover art from the 80s?