An audience with . . .
Hannah Firmin
Hannah Firmin’s hugely successful book cover illustrations for Alexander McCall-Smith’s No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series
Garrick Webster discovers that her imagemaking techniques might be old fashioned
but her book cover illustrations are known
and collected around the globe.
Don’t worry, this isn’t yet another article about the death of print. But
it is a touch ironic that in this digital age one of the world’s best-loved
book cover illustrators uses a technique that dates back 500 years.
While so many others rely on Photoshop and Illustrator, Hannah Firmin
cranks a hand press designed back in the 1830s to produce her wood,
vinyl and lino block prints.
The authentic, crafted look and feel of her cover illustrations
helped Alexander McCall Smith shift well over 10 million books in his
the No1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series since 2003. It also helped
kick start the handmade trend in graphic design that’s carried on to
this day. Her latest piece is the paperback jacket for Wild Hares and
Hummingbirds by broadcaster Stephen Moss.
“With this one what I ended up doing was very dictated by the
title,” she says. “If it’s called Wild Hares and Hummingbirds you’ve got
to include something of either of them on the cover!”
The overall process wasn’t quite that literal. For a start, she
didn’t want the hares to look clichéd. Hares have mythical associations
with fertility, and she wanted to avoid this. “I ended up deciding to have
two hares boxing, but they made up quite a nice shape, like a badge
image on the front. I thought that was quite a bold, eye-catching sort
of design, and then it’s got the background going on for more general
information about the book.”
With those punchy hares in place, what about the
hummingbirds? The book is about the natural history of a Somerset
village and hummingbirds are extremely rare in the county. That’s where
another key tenet of her approach comes in: read the book. “People
think, ‘Humming birds, that’s rather exotic.’ But they’re actually referring
7