Ionicus: The Art of Wodehouse

I came to the works of P.G. Wodehouse at an impressionable age, when I was about twelve or thirteen. My dad had a well-read Penguin copy of Right Ho, Jeeves; one day, when I was off school sick, I picked it up and, at first baffled by Wodehouse's colourful style, so completely different from the penny-plain prose I was used to, I soon became addicted. In the following years, I obsessively collected paperback editions of Wodehouse. That was in the early to late 1980s.

Well, today, thirty years later, I've got rid of most of that old collection, alas, alas. But I find myself going back, not only to Wodehouse but also to the particular editions that, I now realise, were for me an equally powerful positive factor. It's too easy to overlook the attraction of a book lies not only in the words, but also in its physical form, the feel of the cover and of the pages, the quality of the binding, the design of the front and back covers, even the look of the spine on the shelf.

Most, though not all, the Wodehouse titles were published by Penguin at that time, and at that time this meant the covers were by Ionicus.

I knew nothing of Ionicus, of course: not even his real name. I only knew that he was a meticulous, stylish artist who had caught some of the true atmosphere of Wodehouse's world; or was it that my perception of Wodehouse's world was coloured, from the first, by this gravely humorous artist?

Wodehouse's books have been badly served over the years by cover artists. I'll probably come back to that in the future. Let's be honest for a moment. I hate with a passion the editions of Wodehouse that have been published by Penguin and Arrow since the Millennium. The Arrow art has a cheap and crude look, without style. The Penguin editions that were in the shops a few years ago seem to have died out, but I cannot regret that: of course Wodehouse's characters are almost cartoons, but the art made them too cartoonish, and as for the decision to set the internal text left-justified, with ragged right hand edges.... Well, I will say no more. Even the Everyman editions, though admirable in seeking to publish Wodehouse accurately, have problematic cover art, often with a grim, hard edge. In particular, the decision to illustrate the cover of Uncle Fred in the Springtime with a character who has decided to black up as an African warrior, is, in this day and age, not well judged.

No, give me Ionicus every time.

The aim of this blog is to celebrate the artwork created by Ionicus for the Penguin Wodehouse in the 1970s and 1980s. I will be including scans of the best of these covers, with my personal comments and some possibly debatable opinions. I hope I do not offend copyright, and if I receive any serious objections I'll take the site down. My intention is only to show my love for the work of this remarkable artist, and is not in any sense commercial.

To start, here is his cover for Vintage Wodehouse, an anthology edited by Richard Usborne:

Here we have the major recurrent Wodehouse characters: Jeeves and Bertie Wooster of course, Lord Emsworth and Beach, Lady Constance and Aunt Agatha, Ukridge, and looking directly out at us, the irrepressible Hon Galahad Threepwood; even the great Empress of Blandings, for once given her true colours (Wodehouse described her as a Black Berkshire sow but illustrators, including Ionicus on other occasions, usually made her pink). Ionicus didn't depict Lady Florence Craye elsewhere,* but I think we have her, and possibly Madeleine Bassett too (speaking with Mr Mulliner). Wodehouse plots almost always revolve around significant objects to be obtained by fair means or foul, and we have a fair selection of these scattered around also. Ionicus clearly knew and understood the Wodehouse world well by the time he designed this cover.

I'll say more about his style on other occasions, I think, but for now: just look at those hands!

One final thing. I call him Ionicus, but his name was Joshua Charles Armitage. You can find more about his life here.

*Correction: she appears on the cover of A Pelican at Blandings, and also the non-Penguin Sunset at Blandings. I will have to take care to do my homework for future posts.

Postscript: 10 September 2016

As the comments below make abundantly clear, I wrote this post without having a copy of the actual book in front of me and making use instead of a scan of the cover taken from the Internet. I have now acquired a real copy of Vintage Wodehouse, and I have taken the opportunity to replace the previous scan with an actual scan of the copy I now have. I also add a scan of the back cover below, because it includes a helpful key to the figures on the front.