Tom Adams' Agatha Christie cover story. >>SIGNED BY ARTIST<< Tom [Thomas Charles Renwick] Adams (1926-2019). ISBN 9780905895628 Condition: Very Good

Title: Tom Adams' Agatha Christie cover story. >>...

Publisher: Paper Tiger.

Publication Date: 1981

Binding: Hardcover

Book Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

Signed: Signed by Illustrator

Edition: 1st Edition

Signed on title page by Tom Adams. 144 printed pages. 22.5 x 30 cm. Original blue cloth. Complete with original unclipped dust-jacket (edges very mildly toned). Includes loosely tipped in signed printed letter from Geoffrey C. Greenwood, Chairman of Intercraft (many of Adams original paintings hung in the Intercraft showrooms). Provenance: Ann Freeman (nee Piggott), former partner and widow of George Freeman (1930-2019) former president of the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers (now the Chartered Society of Designers) 1979 -81, founder of George Freeman Design Consultants, Drayton Park, London N5. Adams's first book cover in 1961 (John Fowles' The Collector) was sent to Patsy Cohen, art director at Collins, by his agent, Virgil Pomfret. Cohen cautiously asked Adams for a cover for the new edition of A Murder Is Announced. Ignoring the usual detectives and dead bodies, Adams came up with a refined glass-domed clock and wilted violets on a newspaper clipping on the mantelpiece, with bullet holes in the wall behind. Cohen approved, and the book's publication in 1962 marked the beginning of an 18-year engagement for Adams with Christie's novels. He provided more than 100 Christie covers, first published in the sixties, seventies and eighties in the UK by Fontana and in the USA by Pocket Books, they have been reproduced throughout the world by many other publishers & constitute some of the most famous examples of paperback art ever produced. Surreal juxtaposition was a favoured mode, Adams claiming that classical surrealism lent itself to the illustration of thrillers and crime. Adams drew on Rene Magritte, replacing a vicar's head with a tennis racket for The Murder at the Vicarage. Giant insects provided a significant theme, with a huge fly hovering over a body (Mrs McGinty's Dead), a trapdoor spider emerging from the head of a woman (Appointment With Death) and, most famously, an enormous wasp attacking an aircraft (Death in the Clouds), which inspired a 2008 episode of Doctor Who (The Unicorn and the Wasp). Apart from his successful collaborations with Christie and Fowles (which included the 1969 first edition of The French Lieutenant's Woman), Adams also painted paperback covers for Raymond Chandler and Robert Silverberg (both for the New York publisher Ballantine), and dust jackets for Jonathan Cape. These included a Daliesque cover for Kingsley Amis's Colonel Sun (1968) and The Alteration (1976), Patrick White's The Vivisector (1970), David Storey's Saville (1976, described by John Fowles as a "quite literal dream of a jacket") and Peter Straub's Ghost Story (1979). Adams also illustrated The Great Detectives (1981) by Julian Symons (co-editor of this book). In 1980, with the backing of Geoffrey Greenwood, Tom Adams opened the new Calvert print gallery in Pimlico. His paintings have been exhibited in The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, The Portal Gallery, The Fulham Gallery, The Calvert Gallery, ICA and RBA galleries. Tom Adams signed books are scarce. Seller Inventory # 5205