The Victor picture.

Possibly the expression that books have given the the world that has made the biggest impact on the culture is  the one about not judging books by their visual representation. Yet we do and possibly most ironically of all we do it to books, a lot.
A lot of time and money goes into researching what consumers like to see on book covers and react to the most favourably and one assumes that that money would not continue to be spent if there weren't concrete results to point to.
It makes sense to the buyer because of the tactile experiences that are involved in buying a book. The look and the feel and even the smell add to the pleasure of owning the book. A friend sent me one of his poetry books that is an experience in itself without even opening it.
But mostly it comes down the front picture that catches us and holds us, maybe, in the mass markets, for that extra second that decides us one way or the next.
After we own the book the cover becomes the mental picture that we associate with "that story" just as we do not think "shoe" but "that thing that goes on my foot"
We may even get extra insight into the book by looking at the cover while with other books the cover is like a condensed version of the whole story and it is like a grown up version of "Where's Wally?" to see what is going on. The best example of that would be Josh Kirby's illustrations for Terry Pratchett's Discworld stories.
But the illustrator that I want to write about today is Victor Ambrus. He was born in Hungary but fled to England in 1956 following the unsuccessful revolution, apparently having just escaped from a collapsing building at one stage.
His historical illustrations appear to have been in demand from the time he left Art School. He quickly became established and became a free-lance artist with a back up of lecturing from 1963 to 1985 at Art colleges.
The author that is most associated with Ambrus's art in my mind is Rosemary Sutcliff. Her historical fiction fit in very well with Ambrus's illustrations.
I think the reason that Ambrus's work is so suited to historical fiction is because of the feeling that we get from the pictures of the everyday life that is somehow captured by the slightly imprecise lines of the figures.
You can see that the shoes that someone has on are not very clean or their helmet has been battered around a bit. And while there is that impreciseness it is only slightly so, in the lines of the drawings, the clothes and weapons that are being used are absolutely true to the time.
Similarly the people are not all TV series good looking because, most people aren't, and they seem to belong to the times they are in.
Similarly the style of drawing lends itself well to a windswept landscape where it is not very warm. The people in the illustrations seem to belong where they are.
This has all stood Victor Ambrus in good stead in his job as the illustrator of the Channel 4 series "Time Team"  where his sketches show us how the various objects, buildings and sometimes people fit all together and he has lost none of his ability to convey his imagination onto paper.