Fontana Modern Masters

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.

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:

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:

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:

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:

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