Papers of John Munday, Graphic Designer and Art Director, ca. 1958 - 2015

This collection is comprised of documents and other items which were generated during the course of John Mundays career. This began in the 1950s when Munday attended the Sunderland Art College and the Royal College of Art, and also includes his publishing career, which began in the 1970s and continued until 1995 when he retired. The items within the collection which relate to the early period of Mundays career consist of printing blocks and print copies, and also, books and magazines which were produced and designed by the John Munday. The documents which pertain to Mundays later career in publishing are mostly comprised of jacket cover designs for books which were published at the various publishing houses when Munday was the Art Director. The collection also contains letters from various individuals, including authors and fellow staff members regarding jacket cover designs and also, a number of magazine interviews.

John Munday trained as at the Royal College of Art as an illustrator, becoming an art director upon graduating. He first worked for Jaeger Advertising group, before joining The Ambassador magazine, where he worked for two years. After working for several more advertising firms in the 1960s and early 1970s, including Lonsdale Advertising where his accounts included BMW, he moved into publishing. Munday already had some experience in the publishing world; in 1963he had compiled and designed The Metalization of a Dream by Eduardo Paolozzi, a limited edition of 400 printed by The Lion and Unicorn Press. After working as Art Director for W.H. Allen (1972- 1976), where he produced the original look for Star Books, their mass market imprint, and Corgi Books (1976- 1986). Munday became Creative Director at Harper Collins in 1986. He was responsible for all imprints, including Trade Division Thorsons, Harvell Press and Flamingo; at this time Harper Collins was publishing around 1500 titles per year.

This collection has been divided into six series, which have been further broken down into files and items. For the most part, each series is in relation to different periods of John Mundays career, which spanned from the 1950s to 1995. This is with the exception of two series, the first of which is the fifth series, which is an overview of Mundays career in publishing, with the second being the sixth series, which consists of magazine interviews with John Munday. Where possible within the collection, the original order has been maintained, in particular files which had already been bundled together in the original arrangement. However, some files and items have been moved in order for coherence within series and have been arranged in chronological order.

This archive collection is available for consultation in the V&A Study Rooms by appointment only. Full details of access arrangements may be found here: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/archives/.

Additionally access to some of these files may be restricted. These are identified at file level.

Descriptive catalogue

Papers are in good condition, however, a lot of the documents are contained in plastic pocket folders and need transferring to Melinex.

For conservation reasons the photocopying of archival material is not permitted. Archives may be photographed for study purposes only, at the discretion of the archivist.

This collection was gifted to the V&A Archive of Art and Design by John Munday, 2016.