Pares, Bip
Entry updated 16 February 2026. Tagged: Artist.
Working name of UK illustrator Ethel Pares (1904-1977); the "Bip" came from her childhood attempt to pronounce the name of a family horse. From 1928 for some years, she executed posters for London Transport; most of her circa 600 dustjackets were done before World War Two, often for works of genre interest: much of this work continues to await discovery. Some of her best designs appeared on the covers of sf novels, such as E Phillips Oppenheim's The Dumb Gods Speak (1937) and the same author's Mr Mirakel (1943), both Near Future tales involving Inventions; her work featured on quite a number of Oppenheim's non-sf novels, too. She did covers for an impressive array of other crime-fiction writers, including Ronald A Knox, S Fowler Wright and several for Michael Gilbert. Among further authors to receive a plurality of Pares covers was James Hilton; for Goodbye Mr Chips (1934) she did not only the cover but interior Illustrations. Far more central to the genre were her covers for Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker (1937), for Susan Ertz's Woman Alive (1935) – for which she also did interiors – and for Francis Gerard's Secret Sceptre (1937). The best of her cover Illustrations are strikingly beautiful; many have an Art Deco sensibility. Her skill in the use of colour was striking, whether muted or bold.
Pares studied at London's Slade School of Fine Art 1923-1924 and again for a few months in 1926. She married twice, in the first instance spending her honeymoon as part of the 1938 British expedition to Mount Everest. From this experience came the only book she wrote (and also illustrated): Himalayan Honeymoon (1940). She spent the latter part of her life in the London village of Hampstead. [JGr]
Ethel "Bip" Pares
born Clewer, near Windsor, Berkshire: 27 February 1904
died London: 4 February 1977
further reading
- Bill Connelly. "Bibliography: Bip Pares" (Summer 2002 Studies in Illustration #21) [journal of the Imaginative Book Illustration Society: mag/]
links
- Bip Pares at The Bookhunter on Safari
- Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Bip Pares crime fiction jackets
- Picture Gallery
previous versions of this entry