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HW's design suggestions for the cover
As with the Love and the Loveless cover, HW had his own ideas on the design of the cover for A Test to Destruction, and fragments of draft notes and letters that he sent in July 1960 to Walter F. Parrish, a director at Macdonald, survive, together with Parrish's no-nonsense response. These are shown below.
It is not known who designed the cover – there is no mention of James Broom Lynne in the correspondence, neither is Broom Lynne credited on the dust wrapper. In view of HW's opinion of Broom Lynne's interpretation of the two hands clasped in comradeship for the dust wrapper for Love and the Loveless ('Too insensitive. The Soviet-tractor statistics factory comrades clasp in concrete', HW wrote on his own copy of the book), it may even be that HW asked that Broom Lynne not be involved with this next novel.
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