Sam Peffer

The cover of Scorpion Reef by Charles Williams featured Peffer in boxing stance and his stuntman brother-in-law, Jack Cooper, being knocked out of the boat.

Samuel John Peffer (known as Peff; 3 November 1921 – 14 March 2014) was a British commercial artist who designed film posters, paperback book covers and the covers of home videos. His best known work was for the covers of the paperback James Bond novels published by Pan Books in the 1950s and 1960s, for which he created a consistent and distinctive style.

Early life and war service Peffer was born in Islington, London, into a poor family, the son of an interior decorator. He left school at 13, working first as an errand boy for Leon Goodman Displays, a company that produced front of house displays for cinemas. Soon he moved to Weddell Brothers who produced film publicity materials and when their artist was called up for military service in 1940, Peffer replaced him, painting publicity images of Hollywood film stars.

In 1942 he was called up to serve in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. He saw action in Operation Pedestal, the convoys to Malta which was besieged by the Germans. He wrote of an attack on one convoy just after sunset: Then they came. Little shapes in the distance, growing bigger as they approached the convoy. Every gun was cocked and ready. All hell broke loose as they began to dive and the ships began their fire. The noise was deafening, the guns pounding, the roaring of the engines as the dive-bombers screamed down at us. Bombs exploded all around, torpedoes were dropped as the Heinkels and Stukas came out of their dives. It was over quite quickly. He worked for various firms in the film publicity business until eventually joining Pearl and Dean where he was in charge of the art department and knew John Vernon. He was paid about £40 for each one. This was part of a growing trend by British paperback publishers in the 1960s to use more photographic covers or to buy in "second rights" painted images from abroad. Sometimes the same image might appear on more than one book. Together with increased competition in painted covers from younger Italian artists like Renato Fratini, there was a general decline in cover work for artists like Peffer by the end of the 1960s. He often worked for Stanley Long, known for his cheap 1970s British sex comedies, and Peffer described himself as the painter for "the raincoat brigade". His original design is still in use on DVD releases of the film.

By the mid-1980s, film distributors and exhibitors were facing a crisis as audiences in the United Kingdom fell to the lowest level since the Second World War. Demand for traditional painted posters was declining as cinemas used different forms of promotion, printers were closing down and UK based executives of the old school were retiring. With low audiences, US distributors were reluctant to spend money on separate UK publicity campaigns. It was at this time, 1985, that Peffer retired. He described his last year in the business as "terrible – there was no work at all".

Method Peffer often modelled for his own covers, as did his wife Kitty He signed all of his Pan and Panther work with the nickname Peff that he picked up while in the Royal Navy but tended to only sign the better work for other publishers.