The Fontana Modern Masters was a series of pocket guides on writers, philosophers, and other thinkers and theorists who shaped the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. The first five titles were published on 12 January 1970 by Fontana Books, the paperback imprint of William Collins & Co, and the series editor was Frank Kermode, who was Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. The books were very popular with students, who "bought them by the handful", according to Kermode, and they were instantly recognisable by their eye-catching covers, which featured brightly coloured abstract art and sans-serif typography.
Art as book covers
The Fontana Modern Masters occupy a unique place in publishing history – not for their contents but their covers, which draw on the following developments in twentieth-century art and literature:
Twentieth-century geometric abstraction, colour-field painting and hard-edge painting. Op Art, and in particular the work of Victor Vasarely. The English beatnik Brion Gysin's cut-up technique as popularized by William Burroughs.
The cover concept was the brainchild of Fontana's art director John Constable, who had been experimenting with a cover treatment based on cut-ups of The Mud Bath, a key work of British geometric abstraction by the painter David Bomberg. However, a visit to the Grabowski Gallery in London introduced Constable to the work of Oliver Bevan, a graduate of the Royal College of Art in 1964, whose optical and geometric paintings were influenced by Vasarely's Op Art. On seeing Bevan's work, Constable commissioned him to create the covers for the first ten Fontana Modern Masters, which Bevan painted as rectilinear arrangements of tesselating blocks. Each cover was thus a piece of abstract art, but as an incentive for readers to buy all ten books the covers could be arranged to create a larger, composite artwork. The "set of ten" books appeared in 1970–71 but overran when Joyce was published with the same cover as Guevara:
Camus by Conor Cruise O'Brien, 1970
Chomsky by John Lyons, 1970
Fanon by David Caute, 1970
Guevara by Andrew Sinclair, 1970
Lévi-Strauss by Edmund Leach, 1970
Lukács by George Lichtheim, 1970
Marcuse by Alasdair MacIntyre, 1970
McLuhan by Jonathan Miller, 1971
Orwell by Raymond Williams, 1971
Wittgenstein by David Pears, 1971
Joyce by John Gross, 1971
A second "set of ten" featuring a new Bevan cut-up was published in 1971–73 but the inclusion of Joyce in the first "set of ten" left this second set one book short: Freud by Richard Wollheim, 1971 Reich by Charles Rycroft, 1971 Yeats by Denis Donoghue, 1971 Gandhi by George Woodcock, 1972 Lenin by Robert Conquest, 1972 Mailer by Richard Poirier, 1972 Russell by A J Ayer, 1972 Jung by Anthony Storr, 1973 Lawrence by Frank Kermode, 1973
A third "set of ten" featuring Bevan's kinetic Pyramid painting began to appear in 1973–74 but Constable left before the set was complete and his replacement, Mike Dempsey, scrapped the set-of-ten incentive after eight books: Beckett by A Alvarez, 1973 Einstein by Jeremy Bernstein, 1973 Laing by Edgar Z. Friedenberg, 1973 Popper by Bryan Magee, 1973 Kafka by Erich Heller, 1974 Le Corbusier by Stephen Gardiner, 1974 Proust by Roger Shattuck, 1974 Weber by Donald G MacRae, 1974
Dempsey switched the covers to a white background and commissioned a new artist James Lowe, whose cover art for the next eight books in 1975-76 was based on triangles: Eliot by Stephen Spender, 1975 Marx by David McLellan, 1975 Pound by Donald Davie, 1975 Sartre by Arthur C Danto, 1975 Artaud by Martin Esslin, 1976 Keynes by D. E. Moggridge, 1976 Saussure by Jonathan Culler, 1976 Schoenberg by Charles Rosen, 1976
Nine more books appeared in 1977–79 with cover art by James Lowe based on squares: Engels by David McLellan, 1977 Gramsci by James Joll, 1977 Durkheim by Anthony Giddens, 1978 Heidegger by George Steiner, 1978 Nietzsche by J P Stern, 1978 Trotsky by Irving Howe, 1978 Klein by Hanna Segal, 1979 Pavlov by Jeffrey A Gray, 1979 Piaget by Margaret A Boden, 1979
Dempsey left Fontana Books in 1979 but continued to oversee the Modern Masters series until a new art director, Patrick Mortimer, was appointed in 1980. Four more books followed under Mortimer with cover art by James Lowe based on circles: Evans-Pritchard by Mary Douglas, 1980 Darwin by Wilma George, 1982 Barthes by Jonathan Culler, 1983 Adorno by Martin Jay, 1984