Ricahrd Hollis joins Five Leaves

Richard Hollis has been in publishing, or on its fringes, for 50 years. He has worked as a printer, art editor, production manager, teacher and lecturer. His first complete book designs were for Weidenfeld and Andre Deutsch. This was in the early 1960s, a time when he went on to design a series of covers for Penguin and, after a year in Paris in Galeries Lafayette's publicity studio, became art editor of New Society. As well as teaching at the London College of Printing and at the Central School of Art and Design, he was art director of Pluto Press and for a short time design and production director at Faber and Faber. In the 1970s he worked with John Berger on several books, which began with his Booker-winning G and included his best-seller Ways of Seeing. Hollis has designed art catalogues for Bridget Riley and the Whitechapel Art Gallery. This summer he worked on a book for the British artist Steve McQueen at the Venice Biennale. For forty years Richard Hollis made the layout and covers for Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort’s quarterly Modern Poetry in Translation. He does the typesetting for his wife Posy Simmonds’s graphic novels including Tamara Drewe, now being filmed by Stephen Frears. His first three books appear under his own name, but under the umbrella of Five Leaves. Two are connected with Ted Hughes and with a single London house. The memoir of Ted Hughes is written by Daniel Huws, the tenant of the flat where Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath stayed. Susan Alliston, the author of the second book, for which Ted Hughes wrote an introduction, at a later date, also lived in the house. The third book, a memoir of his experiences in the Holocaust is by Romek Marber, designer responsible for the basic style across most of the Penguin covers in the early 1960s and in the following twenty years.