Raymond Sheppard, C. F. Tunnicliffe and Ernest Hemingway and The Old Man and the Sea: Part Two

p.33 Flying fish

"There are only two characters of any consequence and one of them is a fish. The other, the principal character, is a Cuban fisherman who is getting on in years and is also down on his luck. Between his bad luck and his time of life there is an unavowed but strongly felt connection. The one seems to confirm the other, in his own mind as in that of his fellow fisher- men. Even the boy whom he has lovingly instructed in their trade is advised by his parents to leave the old man alone." - Dupee, F. W., 1953. "Hemingway Revealed: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway" [Review]. The Kenyon Review, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Winter, 1953), pp. 150-152 &154-155

p.35 Turtles chasing Portuguese-man-of-war

In my last article I told a bit about the background to the novella "The Old Man and the Sea", and now I turn to the first illustrated version produced by the Reprint Society (1953). This edition contains not just Raymond Sheppard's illustrations but also, those by Charles Frederick Tunnicliffe. The publisher commissioned them both to illustrate the book,
"Originally commissioned as alternatives, these two artists' different interpretations of the story were considered so excellent and so interesting in their varying styles that both have been included". As we shall see this is not quite true.

p.37 Man-of-war bird

 
The Reprint Society was started by Alan Bott and included in its make-up publishers Jonathan Cape, Chatto, William Collins, Heinemann, Macmillan, and John Murray, six of the largest publishers in the UK before the Second World War. In the Sixties it was bought out by partners Doubleday (in the USA)  and W. H. Smith in the UK, forming Book Club Associates. One can only imagine how successful the addition of Tunnicliffe and Sheppards' illustrations was based on the multiple editions published thereafter which retained them

pp40-41 The marlin and the old man

Seven illustrations exist by Sheppard that were unpublished and even without these Sheppard has 18 and Tunnicliffe 16 and that's without counting the multiple uses of Sheppard's illustration as cover and endpapers in various editions.

p.47 The man pulls hard on the line

p.54 The man dips his sore hand in the water

p.63 The marlin leaps

In Part Three on "The Old Man and the Sea" we see the unpublished drawings.