As a young man with a budding career as a freelance poster artist, Abram Games (1914-1996) first rose to prominence as Britain’s Official War Artist for posters during World War II, and parlayed his success in that effort into an award-winning post-War freelance career in advertising, corporate branding, book design, and more. His bold, seductive, innovative combinations of image and text attracted clients such Shell, Financial Times, Guinness, British European Airways, the Royal Shakespeare Company, London Transport, El Al, and the United Nations. He designed stamps for Britain, Ireland, Israel, Jersey and Portugal. He designed logos for the 1951 Festival of Britain (winning the 1948 competition), BBC Television (1953), JFS (a Jewish secondary school in Kenton, north London), and the 1965 Queen’s Award to Industry. He produced murals. He invented a vacuum coffee maker — the Cona Coffee Machine — that is still in production today as well as a circular vacuum cleaner and a portable hand-held duplicating machine. And he designed and illustrated book jackets for the legendary British publisher, Penguin Books, among others.

Why am I telling you all this? Because earlier today I happily paid a buck for a beat up copy of the 1958 Penguin paperback edition of Flames in the Sky, a “History of the War in the Air” by a military insider, the French flying ace Pierre Clostermann. Although the cover art is uncredited, it is clearly signed “A. Games.” But that meant nothing to me until after I got home with my purchase and looked up A. Games via Google and found articles about his career on the Wikipedia and Design Museum sites. I just bought the book because I thought the cover was first rate! Here’s a scan of my find:

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