[caption id="attachment_269" align="alignleft" width="193"] cover art officially by Tom Brown.[/caption]

By Nimue Brown

There’s a reason the cover for Intelligent Designing for Amateurs looks so much like the cover of a Victorian novel. It was. As the author of the original novel: Cauldron of the Ancient Savages, is long dead, there’s a pretty good chance the surviving estate won’t sue. Not least because Archibald Simmon’s ‘cauldron’ novel was so entirely hated at the time of publication. It was considered too Pagan, too barbaric, and the lengthy description of an exposed table leg left the text open to accusations of blatant and inexcusable sexuality.

There was great public outcry at the time, led by Reverend Alistair Simmons. It may not be a coincidence that the enraged and offended vicar who repeatedly condemned Archibald from the pulpit, petitioned parliament to have the book banned, and famously performed an exorcism on the Harrogate bookshop’s entire stock of the text, was brother to the author.

Amazingly, that readers of the time entirely failed to notice, much less be offended by what to my modern eye looked like a very obvious lesbian subplot, is a gripe for another day, perhaps.

Archibald Simmons suffered the fate of all artists who are ahead of their time – an early death in a state of poverty and a family who would rather forget that the visionary man had ever existed. Only a few copies of the original remain, with the classic red cover by Fergus Ferguson, who is of course much better known for his non-fiction covers for such legendary titles as ‘The gentleman’s guide to chastising small boys’ and ‘Opium production for beginners’. Fergus Ferguson, thanks in no small part to a hearty opium addiction, has been departed for quite some time, with no heirs apparent, so I feel safe enough in admitting the theft.

The original cover was scanned, and the text replaced. It was such an uncannily good match for my very silly book, Intelligent Designing for Amateurs (which I should clarify is fiction, and not some sort of how-to manual for would-be minor deities) that it seemed a pity to let it languish in obscurity any longer.

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