Today I will take as my text Wodehouse's 1948 novel
Spring Fever. This may surprise you. The novel is not, I must admit, an absolute Wodehouse classic. It's one of his non-series stand-alone farces, and it has a plot about impecunious peers, drunken Americans, and a valuable stamp album which is more or less interchangeable with a number of his other works. However, I'm rereading the thing at the moment and it has a great deal of mid-season charm and a few cracking lines.....
"'He talks to me as if I was a bally fathead,' said Lord Shortlands, who, being one, was sensitive about it."
However, that's not what I wanted to talk about. I'm in the process of re-collecting Ionicus covers for the purposes of this highly important and not at all irrelevant and frivolous blog; and I happen to have picked up two similar but slightly different copies of
Spring Fever. So I thought I'd share them with you, as the differences are minor and of no conceivable interest to anyone.
I beg your pardon; I think I worded that incorrectly. I should of course have said "as the differences are fascinating in the extreme."
Anyway, to proceed. Here are the front cover and spine of a copy printed in 1981:
The cover layout is "Wodehouse Classic": the arch-window frame for the Ionicus illustration; the curved P.G. Wodehouse logo; the vaguely art-deco lettering. The spine is faded, as sometimes happened with some of the Wodehouse titles of this era, but the seventies-period lettering is irresistibly open and friendly.
Now here is a copy from just four years later: 1985, if your mathematics are shaky:
The arched window has disappeared, and "P.G. WODEHOUSE" is now not a unique logo but a set of block capitals that anyone could have done. The title has moved to the bottom of the cover and is also in capitals. Two curved wedges have been introduced to fill in the gaps left by using the old Ionicus illustration in a different cover design. The orange of the spine has lasted the years much better and, I'll warrant, could be left in the sun with minimal effect. But the fonts chosen for author and title are not half so charming: Wodehouse in capitals, and "Spring Fever" in a rather crowded serif. I imagine that the previous Wodehouse design was beginning to look old-fashioned by the mid-eighties, that era of big shoulders and forward-facing haircuts, and it was felt that something had to be done.
The internal text of both copies is in Intertype Times, and it looks like this:
I would note that
Spring Fever was first published by Penguin in 1969, and the typesetting would date from that year. The contrast with
The Code of the Woosters, with its elegant Monotype Garamond from 1953, may be apparent. The effect of the Intertype Times is of matter-of-fact no-nonsenseness; no la-de-da flourishes in the chapter headings; a little more severe, maybe, but it grows on a person.
Turning (at long last!) to the Ionicus illustration, I must confess it isn't one of his best. The central incident - a drunken Augustus Robb walloping the hero Mike Cardinal across the face - does not quite convince. Robb's feet seem to be suspended impossibly in mid-air, and while Mike's balance is understandably "off" at this crisis, there is no sense of an impending purler (please pardon the vocabulary; but I have been reading a lot of Wodehouse lately, and it rubs off on a person). Robb and Mike seem oddly unreal, like posed dummies.
Lady Teresa Cobbold, in the dressing gown, is much better realised (Ionicus was rather good at drawing vivacious Wodehouse heroines): there's startlement in her expression and urgency in her attitude, much more convincing than the incident she's supposedly reacting to. Lord Shortlands (the chubby fellow at the back with his mouth agape) is almost as good. And, practically needless to say, the décor of the room (chair, safe, whatnot, lamps, curtains, bookcases) is beautifully rendered. Give Ionicus a ruler and a perspective drawing to do and he was in his element.
So, in all, I would give the design of this edition (the earlier version) a solid but not spectacular 7/10. However, pardon me; I haven't finished rereading the book yet, and I want to find out how it all ends. Personally, I anticipate several twists.
