Peter Campbell, who has died of cancer aged 74, was the resident designer and art critic for the London Review of Books. He worked for the magazine from its first appearance in 1979 and wrote more than 300 pieces, mainly about art but also, eclectically, about such things as escalators, weeds, bicycles, bridges and hearts. He was the magazine's most prolific contributor. Frank Kermode perhaps delivered more words than he, but fewer articles.
Each fortnight from 1996 onwards, Peter did a cover illustration for the LRB. He came up with a seemingly infinite array of unpredictable images: a yacht and a starfish, a tram, two knickerbocker glories, a game of dominoes, a man walking past a lighted window at night, umbrellas in the rain and a plug in a wall socket (switched to on). The immediate freshness, colour, playfulness and surprise of these covers belied their technical skill, erudition and command of detail and artistic reference.
There have been two gallery exhibitions of his work in London, and another is in preparation in Wellington, New Zealand, for next year. Seeing and drawing were indivisible for Peter. When on holiday in France, he sent postcard watercolours to friends. The last one I received was of a woman in a hat sitting on a bench and holding a live chicken. "No, there is nobody like this here," he wrote, "but my mother did have a pet bantam that sat on her lap."
Domestic images inspired him. He described the LRB job as perfect for him and his "absurd good fortune". It allowed his talent and years of expertise to come together.
Peter was born in Wellington, in a taxi in the Hataitai tunnel. His father, Arnold, was director of education for New Zealand, and his mother, Nancy, was an early advocate of family planning there. Peter's early apprenticeship as a printer and illustrator was served with the poet and publisher Denis Glover, who founded the Caxton Press and then became typographic adviser at the Wingfield Press, where Peter trained. Paper, typography, binding and illustration were as intrinsic to the published book as literary quality, Glover taught.
Peter attended Victoria University in Wellington and in 1960 married a fellow student, Win Doogue. He and Win then boarded the MS Willem Ruys for the month-long voyage to Britain. He lived for the rest of his life in London, but kept a New Zealand ease and way of seeing. "Tramping trips at Christmas settled the New Zealand landscape in my mind," he wrote. Over the years, New Zealand mountains, trees, building types and the occasional antipodean bird turned up in his written and visual work. In London he remained in the same terraced house in Southfields. He wrote about it in 2011 in a piece for the LRB entitled At Home.
For 15 years he worked for BBC Publications. In the late 1960s the BBC published books based on major television series. Peter designed and edited Kenneth Clark's Civilisation ("that prince of editors," Clark called him in his acknowledgments), Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, David Attenborough's Life On Earth and Alistair Cooke's America.
He went freelance in 1976. Authors he had met or worked with at the BBC sought him out to design and edit their books. He had the ability to conceptualise what each publishing project needed and to get it right. He was hugely and diversely productive, but seldom hit a wrong note. For the publisher John Murray, he worked on Clark's post-Civilisation titles and Reynolds Stone's Engravings. He first met the art critic David Sylvester at the BBC and later designed his book Looking at Giacometti and his catalogue for the Hayward Gallery's 1998 exhibition Francis Bacon: The Human Body. Peter's other catalogues included Goya: Drawings from His Private Albums (Hayward Gallery), Titian (National Gallery) and Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay (Royal Academy).
He designed several of my books, among them Selkirk's Island. Peter would know that a book set in the 1790s should have an 18th-century typeface, which maps would make good endpapers, which tooling to have on the spine and when a blank page made essential punctuation. He worked often with Quentin Blake and wrote the introduction to Blake's The Life of Birds. He worked, too, on several books by his fellow LRB contributor Alan Bennett.
The most far-reaching of his BBC connections was with Karl Miller, who edited the Listener from 1967 to 1973. After working with Peter on a Listener anthology, Miller commissioned him to write gallery pieces for the magazine. When Miller was invited by the New York Review of Books to edit a London Review of Books, he asked Peter to be its designer and to contribute reviews.
In 1992 Mary-Kay Wilmers became editor of the LRB. Among the changes she made was commissioning illustrations from Peter for the covers. Until 1996 these used black and white photographs, many of them by Peter. In 2003, when the LRB opened its own bookshop in Bloomsbury, Peter helped design it. The interior reflected his style. The shop's ethos of quality was opposed to books as just another product: three-for-two discounts, "recommendations" paid for by publishers and window space bought by them.
In 2009 Hyphen Press published At … : Writing, Mainly About Art, from the London Review of Books. Peter also wrote and illustrated children's books including Harry's Bee (1969) and The Koala Party (1972). He was a man of habit, at his desk at his untidy King's Cross studio by 8am, unextravagant lunch with friends at 12.30pm, on his way home on the District line by 5pm. He continued to review and make covers for the LRB until a month before his death. The magazine plans to publish an anthology of his covers.
Peter is survived by Win and their children, Jane and Ben; a granddaughter, Izzy; his step-granddaughters, Jess and Jazz; and his sisters, Jane and Margaret.
• Peter Frank Campbell, illustrator, writer, editor and book designer, born 16 April 1937; died 25 October 2011
• This article was amended on 27 October 2011. The original stated that Peter Campbell attended Victoria University in Australia. This has been corrected.
