Nicholas Thirkell obituary

From the time he joined Macmillan Publishers as art director in 1966, Nicholas Thirkell, who has died aged 79, did much to overhaul the conventions of book design. He did this by using hardcover jackets to raise “questions which can only be answered by reading the books”, as the Guardian put it in 1970. The observation was prompted by a Design Council exhibition of book covers by Thirkell and his competitor at Heinemann, and future business partner, Mike Dempsey, displaying “a richness and variety in hardback covers which puts posters, for example, to shame”.

Thirkell’s jacket for The Smaller Sky (1967) was a facsimile of a railway ticket, front-and-back, which hurled readers into the brain of John Wain’s protagonist, a suburban clerk