Peter Campbell, who died on 25 October, was resident designer and art critic at the London Review of Books and, from its relaunch in 2000, the designer of New Left Review. Campbell was contacted by Perry Anderson, returning as editor to undertake the renewal of the journal in a conjuncture transformed by the West’s Cold War victory. nlr’s layout had remained virtually unchanged since Derek Birdsall’s formulation of it in 1964, with broad, asymmetrical margins and bold horizontals on the cover. Campbell recast the typography, using big Bodoni drop caps and a range of delicate, upper- and lower-case Scala fonts. At the editor’s suggestion, he drew the journal’s initials in broad, sweeping brushstrokes, using them to frame the landscape of the journal’s contents and writers on the front cover; bringing them together as a unified statement on the back. Formally distinct elements—calligraphy, letter-press fonts, combinations of colours—were brought into effortless harmony, yielding an endlessly variable but utterly distinctive design. Campbell was born in 1937 in Wellington, New Zealand. He would recall the wooden houses, perched like birds on the precipitous hills that encircled the harbour; and the brightness of the light, bouncing off the surface of the ocean. His father was New Zealand’s Director of Educational Research and Peter grew up with ‘the faded red spines of the Left Book Club and the blue volumes of Scott Moncrieff’s Proust’ on the shelves—‘reading, drawing, walking’, as he wrote in the London Review. At Victoria University, in the late 1950s, he managed to combine a Philosophy degree with English and Geology; and at the same time undertook an intensive apprenticeship, as typesetter, compositor, designer and illustrator, at the poet Denis Glover’s Wingfield Press. He set sail for England in 1960 with his bride Win Doogue, and worked for the next fifteen years for the bbc, designing its books and its house journal The Listener, which forgathered the team that would later found the London Review. ‘As much as the original editors,’ Mary-Kay Wilmers would write, ‘Peter shaped the lrb.’ Paradoxically, his watercolours—landscapes, occasional figures, forgotten corners of domestic life—would bring a particular Englishness to its covers; perhaps because the artistic and intellectual culture of New Zealand, where poets would write art criticism and set type, while theorists and historians manned the presses, was closer to one that had been a vital current in English life, from Morris’s Kelmscott to the Hogarth Press, yet had all but vanished long before the end of the Thatcher era.