Miniature Marvels: The Book-Cover Art of James E McConnell

If you collect fiction from the four decades between the 1930s and 1960s, ‘Jas E McConnell’ is a signature that most will recognise. Between 1931 and 1968, James Edwin McConnell – to give him his full name – painted over 2,000 book covers, over a third of which you’ll find in the pages of Steve Chibnall’s study of the artists’ work, Miniature Marvels: The Book Cover Art Of James E McConnell.  

At the beginning in the 1930s, McConnell was chiefly associated with crime novels, especially the works of Peter Cheyney, Berkeley Grey, Victor Gunn, Vernon Warren and Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu. His output in crime was only eclipsed by the 600 or so Western covers he produced for Amalgamated Press, Fiction House, Mills & Boon and T V Boardman. His 28 Western covers for Corgi Books, who had probably the best line of quality wild west novels in the 1950s and ‘60s, are a testament to McConnell’s incredible imagination, with no two covers alike (thematically yes, artistically no).

At the same time, he was producing romantic and historical covers – his covers for Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels and Raphael Sabatini’s romances of the Spanish Main for Pan may well be amongst his most memorable as they were so widely available in the 1960s.

McConnell’s heroes were square-jawed and he occasionally got into trouble for having the same face he imagined to be heroic on too many covers. Hiring models might have solved the problem; he hired costumes from a shop in Holborn and would have the model dress up, only occasionally photographing them for reference. For the most part he thought hiring models a waste of time, preferring his imagination and using reference material to make sure that details were authentic, although he was not above using an actress from the pages of Picturegoer as a model.

Chiefly he worked in gouache, occasionally in oils, his painting produced ‘twice up’ – double the size of the printed version. He didn’t do any of the lettering… just left enough space for it.

Steve Chibnall’s book expands on McConnell’s life, adding absorbing insights into his career thanks to a 1991 interview with the artist and the assistance of his daughter, Ann. This means that Steve has been able to include photos and many personal anecdotes that flesh out the story of McConnell’s life, which he does over eight chapters, including a running biography and chapters dedicated to various genres, crime, western, romance and others.

These include some fascinating details, such as McConnell’s introduction to Pan Books in November 1957. It is no coincidence that Reginald Heade had died a month earlier and McConnell was commissioned to produce the kind of realistic, delicately-hued covers that would previously have gone to Heade. McConnell and Heade had other connections, not only working for many of the same publishers but both starting out in the dust-jacket market in 1931.

Chibnall catalogues over 1,700 covers identified from McConnell’s own records, with over 750 of them included in this 350 page volume, which is a must-have for anyone who appreciates the art of the book cover.

Miniature Marvels. The book-cover art of James E McConnell by Steve Chibnall. Telos Publishing ISBN 978-184583210-0, 15 June 2023, 352pp, £44.99. Available from Telos.