Over the Top with David

Famed London book illustrator joins site!

Apr 10, 2023

David Mackintosh sends the Lunn family to Melbourne in 1954 in their Zephyr Six with Fred at the wheel and his pith helmet on the roof

David Mackintosh – brought up in Mt Gravatt, Brisbane – will soon be illustrating some of my short stories here.

David will make you laugh – and, perhaps, cry.

How David saw the Lunn family home at Annerley in the 1950s … the four kids protected from the world inside a wonderful snow dome

Before he hit the big time in Europe and the US as a designer and art director, David illustrated my book More Over the Top with Jim (aka Fred and Olive’s Blessed Lino) and my Over the Top with Jim Album and the children’s version called Jim & Me.

But, being so young, when I supplied him with coins from the 1950s to use in the Album he rang in a panic and said: “Which one’s the shilling coin?”

When told, he said: “Ah, I call that one ‘the sheep’s head coin’.”

David had also, of course, never seen a Brisbane tram (trams were, unfortunately, removed from Brisbane in 1969).

So Helen and I took him to the wonderful Tram Museum at Ferny Grove where David grabbed some tram tickets from a Conductor in his Foreign Legion cap for the Album. (Because of my book, they asked me to drive a tram! I did, even though Helen urged me not to in case I crashed it.)

Plus, David designed the Poster for my 1996 Over the Top with Jim Play – directed by Bille Brown – which opened at the first ever Brisbane Festival and then toured Queensland.

Over the Top with Jim itself did not contain photographs of the characters, time, or place because, the editor said, “it reads like a novel”. But – after it became No. 1 in Australia for the year of 1992 – it became apparent many readers thought it was all made up: that there was no Jim, no Fred, no Olive, no Jackie, no Gay, no Sheryl.

Not even a Hughie or a “Lunns for Buns” cakeshop

One woman visiting Brisbane from Melbourne told me: “I was on a bus from Greenslopes when I saw a sign saying Annerley Junction and I thought ‘Oh dear, Annerley Junction is a real place!’”

So University of Queensland Press (UQP) decided to publish the photographic OTTWJ Album ... and hired a very youthful David Mackintosh to design and illustrate it.

Off his own bat, an inspired David then designed a series of OTTWJ dolls to be displayed in the foyer during the Play – Olive, Fred, Jim, Hughie, and my lovely teacher Sister Veronica – and enlisted help from people who could sew.

My perfect little sister Gay got all the attention and I get none

David also created a cloth three-dimensional replica of the Lunn family’s Ford Zephyr Six that we drove to Melbourne in 1954 – with the Lunns painted inside. It included a version of Olive’s kapok mattress on the roof-rack (we camped all the way).

Then our young entrepreneur designed a dozen OTTWJ postcards with photos of the main characters – to sell in shops to promote the Album.

We found a printer in an old shed by the Ipswich railway line … but needed a name for the new postcard company. David immediately came up with one based on the pen-name Fred used when he bought racing tips from Melbourne for the gee-gees.

Tim O’Halloran Press was born.

You could tell David was headed for the top because he always carried a very thick Filofax (“File of Facts”).

At home, he kept his coffee in the freezer.

David’s enthusiasm soon moved him on to bigger things in London where he became – a surprise to none of us – a successful book designer and illustrator and now makes a living doing live drawing events, lecturing on book design, and even a “Drawing Words” exhibition for the British Council in Piccadilly and Athens.

Or as he puts it on his website: “I design books and objects, but mostly I enjoy making things and having them printed.”

David also writes and illustrates his own picture books which are published in the UK, Europe and the US with major publishers like HarperCollins and PenguinRandomHouse.

He’s been working with the National History Museum of London, making books using their collections of natural history art to write and illustrate books for children about dinosaurs: Dippy the Diplodocus and Titanosaur, associated with the current NHM exhibition of the largest animal to have ever walked the earth.

As David says: “Dinosaurs were bigger than an Annerley tram!”

Last year Monsieur Mackintosh brought out a new picture book My Dog Hen.

The story is about sustainability, which David says “is a nice word for trying not to waste things”.

If you'd like to learn more about what he does, click on his links here: commission a design or illustration project big or small, or drop me a line.

Or watch these substack pages to see his pen in action.