Following the success of a Kickstarter campaign and the international delivery of books to backers, The Art of Renato Fratini is now available to purchase directly from Ink Forge Press, in three different editions.
Who was the man behind the most famous James Bond poster ever made? Renato Fratini’s art defined British cinema and the pop glamour of the Swinging Sixties, but after his sudden death in 1973, aged just forty, his name all but vanished.
Authorised by the Fratini Estate, The Art of Renato Fratini restores his lost legacy. Based on a decade of research, rare interviews, and passionate collecting, this visual biography unveils hundreds of rarely seen works – a celebration of an artist almost lost to time.
Years in the making, this lavish limited edition 448-page hardcover isn’t, be warned, cheap, but it is a stunning looking celebration of one of the most extraordinary illustrators of the twentieth century, featuring hundreds of images spanning his remarkable career in publishing, cinema and commercial art.
In Swinging Sixties London, Renato Fratini became one of the most sought-after illustrators in British cinema and publishing. Movie studios, publishers and advertising agencies competed for his brush.
He painted the celebrated From Russia with Love artwork that helped define Bond’s visual identity. He illustrated the Carry On franchise across nine films and produced more than 600 book covers for Fontana, Penguin, Corgi and Heinemann, transforming how romance, crime and adventure looked on British paperback racks.
His illustrations appeared on books that sold in their tens of millions and on some of the most memorable cinema advertising of the era. Yet until now, his name remained largely unknown.
The Art of Renato Fratini is the first book to tell his extraordinary story and bring together his astonishing body of work – more than 900 images spanning film posters, paperback covers, advertising and magazine illustration.
Edited by DeMonfort University’s Professor Steve Chibnall, one of the UK’s leading historians of British cinema, author Timothy R. Smith devoted thirteen years to researching, collecting and tracing hundreds of paintings, posters and illustrations – many never credited, catalogued or reproduced before.
Beautifully printed and bound in Italy, the book is available in three editions: a Legacy Edition, 1960s Crime Noir Dustjacket Edition and Collector’s Slipcase Edition.
The response from collectors and readers around the world has been incredibly gratifying, and the team behind the project are thrilled to finally make the book available beyond the original Kickstarter campaign.
• The Art of Renato Fratini is available to order directly at renatofratini.com
Author and Editor
Timothy Smith is a writer and independent researcher based in the Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia, with a background in arts management and the entertainment industry.
His discovery of Renato Fratini’s unsigned romance covers in a Sydney charity shop in 2012 sparked what would become thirteen years of obsessive research – tracking down auction records from London to Istanbul, consulting archives in Rome and Sydney, and interviewing Fratini’s surviving colleagues and family members. What began as a collector’s curiosity became a mission to rescue a forgotten master from obscurity.
Steve Chibnall is Professor of British Cinema and Visual Culture at De Montfort University, where he is also Director of Archives for the Cinema and Television History Research Centre. Since 1973, Steve has published widely on crime journalism, twentieth century popular culture, and the history of film production and commercial art in Britain. His outputs include fifteen authored or edited books (including Sim Branaghan’s British Film Posters, published back in 2006), numerous academic articles, interviews for radio and television, sleeve notes for DVD releases and contributions to the Oxford Critical Bibliographies and Dictionary of National Biography. His last three books have been on three British mid-century creatives: the book illustrators Reginald Heade (co-authored with Stephen James Walker for Telos Publishing) and James McConnell, and the ill-fated film star, Belinda Lee.
Steve has also co-curated live events at venues including London’s Royal Albert Hall, Cinema Museum, Picturehouse and Regent Street Cinemas; and exhibitions at Brighton Pavilion Museum and Gallery and De Montfort University (‘Scandal ’63 Revisited: The Profumo Affair in Art and Artefact’, which was selected as ‘Exhibition of the Week by the Guardian).
Over the last decade, he has established a track record of acquiring archive donations for his university, beginning with the script collection of Hammer Films, and continuing with the archives of artists Andrew Logan and Peter Whitehead, the production files of Palace Pictures, and in 2022, the archive of Dame Zandra Rhodes.
Steve’s primary academic mission is to identify, research, and bring to public attention aspects of cultural production that have been unjustly ignored or neglected. As part of this work, Steve curates a large and significant private collection of film memorabilia, magazines, pulp fiction, original commercial artwork, and other artefacts associated with selected aspects of twentieth century popular culture.
• The Art of Renato Fratini is available to order directly at renatofratini.com
- About the Author
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John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
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