Book cover: Intimacy

Intimacy, by Jean-Paul Sartre, Peter Nevill Ltd, 1949, cover by Guy Nicholls

The first reaction to this cover has to be a smirk. Here’s the classic example, you might think, of a publisher using sex to sell.

The cover features a cheesy illustration of the story’s central character, Lulu. She surely has something to do with Frank Wedekind’s ill-starred character of the same name, a society beauty fallen on tough times and driven to prostitution. In Sartre’s Intimacy Lulu struggles with two lovers (as well as with traditional and accepted female roles), eventually chooses the staid and intimate relationship over the tantalising but unknown promise of another love.

On the cover she appears at the door, décolletage exposed, hair down, lips parted, the image of the pulp cover lover. Knowing what we know of Sartre’s existentialist high-mindedness it looks more than a little incongruous. But this is a story that begins, “Lulu slept naked because she liked to feel the sheets caressing her body ... ” and by the end of the first page has covered Lulu’s fondness for her lover’s dirty underpants and how “she couldn’t stand the English with their impersonal bodies which smelt of nothing”.

In fact, it appears, Guy Nicholls has, in his pulpy, comic-book style (which foreshadows the recognisable noir-style of graphic novelists such as Frank Miller) caught something of the smell of sex permeating this book, which caused a scandal on its release in 1949.

He also prefigures the dark shadows, dingy wallpaper and seedy sex which would characterise the emergence of the British kitchen-sink movement that appeared a few years later. It is possible to imagine this as a cover for John Braine’s Room at the Top or Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Nicholls, the commercial hack illustrator, it turns out has done something quite remarkable, capturing the content concisely and laying the ground for a revolution in British publishing.