Guinness® Collectors Club

Bensons, the advertising agency acting on behalf of GUINNESS at the time, actively sought testimonials from doctors to substantiate and give credibility to the "Guinness Is Good For You" proposition. Thousands were happy to oblige.

As a means of encouraging the relationship and fostering goodwill, the agency hit upon the idea of producing collectable, limited-edition soft-back booklets which were sent out to doctors each Christmas from 1933 until 1939; the practice was revived after the war in 1950 and continued until 1966. The themed, lavishly illustrated books, notable for their whimsical charm and overt literary parody, contained many lateral - and often ingenious - references to GUINNESS, both visual and verbal.

The first Christmas book to reach doctors' surgeries was The Guinness Alice, an immaculate parody of Lewis Carroll's Alice books written by Ronald Barton and Robert Bevan, and illustrated by John Gilroy. Music hall, mad inventions, Gilbert and Sullivan and DIY provided the focus for other books in the series, though the redoubtable Alice was revisited on another four occasions.

The crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, who was employed in Bensons' creative department from 1922 to 1929, contributed to some of the earlier Doctors' Books. The copywriter Stanley Penn took the lead during the 1950s and 1960s, writing ten books in successive years. The words were erudite enough, but the illustrations that accompanied them were impeccable.

The subtle humour and intricate scene-setting of artists Rex Whistler and Antony Groves-Raines (who illustrated eight of the Guinness Christmas Books) set the early post-war pace. These were later superseded by a more directly comic approach epitomised by the somewhat eccentric work of cartoonists Rowland Emett and Gerard Hoffnung. Bernard Lodge, a pioneer in television graphics who was responsible for the award-winning Dr Who title sequence, is credited (along with Maureen Roffey) with the illustrations for the 1963 Christmas book, Guinness Nonscience, which introduced an arresting graphic approach.