Fine feathers

This is a glorious book with one crippling flaw. Let’s put the ecstasy before the agony. Faber and Faber, founded in 1929, commissioned some of the best book jackets of all time; Private Eye, retracting its claws for once, called the firm Fabber and Fabber — of course that applied to the authors as well as the designs. A few of the designs seem dated in a bad sense, but most of them are joyfully, exhilaratingly redolent of their time — especially the art deco and ‘Contemp’ry’ ones.

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover — an update on ‘Fine feathers don’t make fine birds’ — but you can judge a lot of these books by their jackets. When you see the front of Arnold Whittick’s Eric Mendelsohn (about the German modernist architect), with the sweeping round shape of a characteristic building, you know what’s within is likely to be similarly striking — and it is.