Monkeyface by Stephen Gilbert
Coming from mid-century Britain, it’s easy to assume that the jacket typography of this book uses Gill Sans Light Italic with a few customized swash glyphs. In fact, it’s the corresponding style from Tempo, a sans-serif family issued by the American Ludlow company. Tempo Light Italic comes with a full set of alternate swash caps, the one for M featuring here. The glyphs for B P R with the “protruding roof” as well as the N with the curving stems are the default forms.
Stephen Gilbert’s Monkeyface was published by Faber & Faber in 1948. According to Wikipedia, it tells “the story of an ape-man missing link who is brought from the jungles of South America to the U.K. and learns to speak English, but struggles with adapting to modern human society.”
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See a mid-century Ludlow specimen for the Tempo family including the Light Italic in Stephen’s Flickr photostream: