James has kindly sent me reference to the New Penguin Shakespeare's, with the David Gentleman covers, taken from the book Artwork on the great man. Er...Gentleman that is, not Shakey.
It highlights what a great task it must have been to illustrate all these covers and do it so well, although it took him around ten years to get through them all. It also highlights the task I have ahead of me in trying to collect the lot.
Well, I'd guess it took me just about 2 months to get these together. One of the things that's great about vintage Penguins is that there are numerous mini series. Sometimes they're books by a particular author; if you've got Penguin by Design there's lots of examples shown, like the fantastic Derek Birdsall designed set for John Updike's books.
Penguin Modern Poets 1-7 make a really great set. Number eight, unfortunately signals a slight change of direction and I can only guess at why. In fact, number eight, to me at least, looks like it might have originally followed the principles of the previous seven quite precisely but some force came into play that initated a shift. Certainly, the editions that followed went off on a distinct tangent, design-wise. Perhaps the market demanded greater diversity. Whatever the reason I can't help feel it was a shame.
Fuelled by the bitter disappointment of being outbid on ebay for a copy of The Penguin Shakespeare King John with the superb David Gentleman cover, I made a trip to my dodgy paperback supplier and was compensated three-fold with Much Ado, Henry V and A Midsummer Night's Dream. And so my Othella-found-in-a-charity-bookshop initiated new Penguin collection has begun.
This is what Penguin by Design says about this series, "Gentleman produced a series of woodcuts suggestive of medieval illustrations but with simple coloured areas to give them variety. Each cover is printed black and up to four other colours."
Last week Antonio who writes AisleOne asked me to recommend a good source of vintage Penguin books, ebay lacking suitable examples.
I'm afraid I couldn't help much. There are a few serious Penguin dealers around but they tend to be more interested in first editions than cover design. For me, best is the accidental find in a charity bookshop where there's the thrill of discovery and, usually, a super-low price tag. Now that's not very helpful if you're in New York where secondhand Penguins are thin on the ground.
But Antonio's given me an idea (which I now wish I'd thought of years ago). You see, as you might have realised by now, my Penguin interests are pretty focused: Marber Grid-era mainly, Patterned Penguin Poets, Penguin Education and Specials. So I do find myself occasionally looking at either covers I already have or series' I don't collect, like these Penguin Plays. Perhap I should buy any I come across that you lot might be interested in and pass them on to you. Not quite sure how to set that up yet. Could use ebay but I'm not sure that I can be bothered and I don't want to exploit anyone's weakness for the little fellas by provoking bidding wars.
And perhaps I'm not best placed to do this anyway. If I still lived on the mainland I'd have considerably greater access to supplies. So as much as anything, I'm putting the idea out there for anyone to run with. Perhaps someone's doing it already.
What do you think?
Around the back of our main shopping mall, there is arguably one of Belfast City Centre's dodgiest streets: it's sex shop central. But at one end, there's my best Penguin book supplier. He's got a whole stash of them, tucked away in the far corner, thankfully well away from his more unsavory offering.
And that's where I found this edition of the Dictionary of Science. Again designed by Omnific/Birdsall, although I have no idea what the brief was, I really like the way they've taken the "derivative" idea and turned it into the idea for the design; the book is a derivative, so the design should be too. Genius!. Well, at least that's what I get from it.
But surely that should be "Around...". It's almost as if they lost the cap "A" somehow and an all lower-case heading just seems a bit radical for a book like that. That said, I love the way the text is right up there, as high as it can go.
The Child's World is curious too: Helvetica, not the usual Akzidenz Grotesk. Set so nicely: tight, tight, tight. With a hanging "T". And super cool cropping of the picture, by Gerald Cinamon.
This is a brilliant Omnific/Birdsall designed cover from 1974 (although I think this version may have been first printed in 1971). OK, perhaps the dictionary definition thing is a little cliché now but it wasn't back then. No, forget that; what I should have said was: perhaps the dictionary definition thing is a little cliché when someone else does it but in Birdsall's masterful hands it works beautifully, backing up the real star idea, the extracted S and I.
Oh, and of course, it is a dictionary.
Just look what landed on my desk yesterday, only Pearson's bloody book of Penguin covers.
A mighty volume of "classics and oddities".
David Pelham's bit from this is reproduced on the CR Blog.
James Mackay mentioned this in his comment earlier and it's another example of why I love being a member of the Penguin Collectors' Society. Waiting for me when I got home on Friday, Penguin by Designers, designed itself by David Pearson, is a record of the Study Day at the Victoria and Albert Museum held in June 2005 by The Society. The event celebrated Penguin's 70th anniversary.
It's basically a collection of edited transcripts from the day's talks by John Miles, Germano Facetti, Romek Marber (designer of the famous grid, shown on both covers), Jerry Cinamon, Derek Birdsall, David Pelham and Jim Stoddart. All very significant figures in the publisher's design history.
You can buy it here.
I've been meaning to get these online for a while now. They're designed by Raymond Hawkey who also designed these and are brilliant novels. Funeral was made into an OK film while Brain was turned into a bloody terrible film by Ken Russell. Neither films are a patch on the very perfect and utterly thrilling Ipcress File.
Of these three editions Horse was the first to be published and is most definitely the superior cover. Although not made into a film staring Caine the book's hero is the Harry Palmer character* so I guess when it was issued, to the public, Caine was Palmer hence his mush on the cover. But I must say, I think it's used brilliantly. The way the coarse dot screened image is cut off is more than just dead cool, it's got attitude and Caine's distant gaze is so Palmer.
While I think the other two are OK covers I think they suffer because of the unecessarily "novel" type for the title and the inaccurate depiction of the hero as a machine gun weilding action man.
That stuff inside helps too and again is handled in Horse with much more finesse than in the others.
* It's common knowledge but on the off chance you don't know, in the books the hero (or should that be anti-hero?) is actually anonymous. The Harry Palmer name was necessary for the film adaptation. Wikipedia explains: Needing to name the previously anonymous character, the film production team chose the name 'Harry Palmer' because they wanted the name to be as dull and unglamorous sounding as possible, to distance him from the prevalent stereotype of the flamboyant, swashbuckling secret agent exemplified in the Bond movies.
Mr Bingo's sent me links to his flickr sets. He has a small but well formed collection of Penguin/Pelicans and there's some little gems. The Literary Critics and Chosen Words are designed by Birdsall. The Modern Writer is, Bingo tells me, by Gerald Cinamon, who did a lot of freelance work for Penguin during the 60s. Then there's Self and Others, Laing's follow up to The Divided Self, with a cover based on Martin Bassett's earlier design.
I happen to know Edwin Taylor designed the cover for The Normal Child. But for me Hurry on Down, is the the stand out cover; such restraint. I'm probably wrong but I'd take a wild guess at Paul Hogarth. Anybody know for sure?
Bingo's also got a lot of interesting vintage postcards. (Oh, and, of course, a very silly name).
Actually, no offence meant. Perhaps that's your real name; these things happen.
Thanks for sharing Bing.
Decided to scrap the entry that was previously here due to it being probably the worst thing I've ever written on Ace Jet. Sorry for any confusion, particularly to Mr One-Hundred. Terribly sorry about that but congratulations! We're there already (he knows what I mean).
It was really about this from earlier in the year, from the excellent We Made This blog:
It was a brilliant idea!
Glad the last post was a biggy because this week is proving to be a slow blog week due to pressure from work (late nights etc). Perhaps a good time to put up a couple of random Penguins.
Not sure if either fit into any series but I think both show exceptional layouts.
He and She is by Bruce Robertson (seen here sporting a fine, William Morris-style beard) who designed many brilliant covers for Penguin's non-fiction sister brand Pelican (which is a rich source of currently loft-based blog stuff yet to be tapped). Robertson was a co-founder of the Diagram Group and, as you will see (one day) from his Pelican covers, was a bit of a pioneer of information graphics. He really did do some ground-breaking stuff and without doubt could knock up a good diagram, unfortunately the Group's current output, while very informative I'm sure, are less than stylish publications. He also wrote this.
I think this cover design is ace. It's so up. All that grass! And the old focal point picked out in black and white trick, which was relatively new in the 60's probably.
Nasser's Egypt isn't credited but reminds me of The Stagnant Society by Richard Hollis, so perhaps there's a link. Great, low position for the photo and interesting, at first glance random but probably hanging off some part a grid, your guess is as good as mine, position for the bird.
Talking of purely decorative patterns, these are fantastic. Although I've often hesitated to buy them (not sure quite why) I've seen quite a few Penguin music scores that follow the same design principle as the Poetry series but applied to a near A5 landscape format. I'm sure I've even seen the same patterns applied to both.
Len Deighton has written many ace spy stories. It's a little less known that he wrote a number of innovative and brilliant cook books. First published in 1965 by Penguin (of course), Ou Est Le Garlic features Deighton's own "cookstrips" that illustrate basic French home cooking techniques, processes and dishes. It's not surprising to learn, when you see them, that the man had worked as a graphic artist and his strips had been featured in the London Observer before being published in book form.
How appropriate that the cover was designed by a French man, Jacques Dehornois, in Paris. Although not the prettiest design when viewed today, I really admire it; trying hard as it does to look like the window of an authentic French bistro rather than a book.
Related trivia I know about Deighton:
In my favourite film of all time, The Ipcress File, you can see Deighton's cookstrips pinned to a post in Harry Palmer's kitchenette and when Palmer seduces Courtney with his culinery prowess and cracks an egg into his frying pan with one hand, Caine was unable to do it so the hand you see is in fact Deightons.
Much has been said lately about the cover designs of the Penguin Education series, largely designed by Derek Birdsall and his Omnific studio; what with the publication of his Notes on book design, Penguin by Design: A Cover Story by Phil Bains and a current exhibition at The Design Museum in London. Nevertheless, as I'm in Penguin-mode right now, having rummaged through my sadly loft-based collection recently, I feel moved to pay tribute to them myself.
For me, it started with Juniors, which I stumbled across in the bargain bin of a secondhand bookshop in Leicester. I've always liked typographic trickery, so the cover leaped out. So simple and clever, so seemingly effortless. Genius!
I went looking for others and over time found these: Poverty is perfect, with its small, pre-decimal sixpence, not only replacing the "O" but it's even "too little"; Personality, with its highlighted "i", the style of which I personally don't like but can't ignore that it just works; and, Psychology and Religion which, interestingly, is a forerunner to Birdsell's cover design of Common Worship for the Church of England.
Then there's: Ageing and its well burnt candle; the half coloured-in Comprehensive: Half Way There; and Family, with its cunning use of different brackets.
During the sixties Penguin published "Specials" that dealt with topical issues. By their nature, they had to be written and published very quickly. The cover designs were often very strong, again reflecting the nature of the subject matter. The cover for "The Stagnant Society" (designed by Richard Hollis) is brilliant, I think, for a number of reasons: of course, it's conceptually spot on; the graphic element is in such a surprising but effective position; and the title just leaps off the page.
"persecution 1961" was designed by the very great Germano Facetti, who sadly died earlier this year and who was the major force behind Penguin design of this era. Italian born Facetti was Art Director at Penguin between 1960 and 72 and was responsible for commissioning Romek Marber who developed that wonderful grid.
There's part of me that is a stickler for consistency and then there's another part that enjoys the intelligent subversion of the rules. That's partly why the Marber Grid era Penguin Crime covers appeal so much. The grid dictates the layout but every now and again you find a cover, like Killer's wedge that tries to break out of the mould, all be it subtly. The line below the author's name has been removed and although the montage below forms part of the image area, the space to the left spills out. On 'Til death, the confetti spills into the title area.
OK, perhaps they're subtle but I imagine when Alan Spain first presented the ideas eyebrows were raised in the Penguin office all those years ago. And I also imagine them saying, "why not?".
Back to my inner stickler; it soon becomes evident that not only did a single designer often become responsible for the covers of a particular author, but the designs often feature consistent elements. In the case of Spain's McBain covers there's the black and white photography, the precinct sign and an element in red - sometime minimal like the red pupil on The mugger, sometimes more prominent like the confetti.
More Marber Grid era Penguins; this time Main Series fiction. Generally, Main Series covers incorporated illustration styles much more diverse than Crime fiction, so I'm much more selective. Paul Hogarth's illustrations were fantastic (below). The cover above is by Derek Birdsall, one of my design heroes.
Generally speaking, the original triple stripe design is thought to be the classic Penguin but I can't help feel that once you've seen one, you've seen them all. For me, it's the Marber Grid era that rules. The geometrically constructed grid system, into which Penguin dropped strong illustrations and innovative photo montages, helped to perpetuate a powerful and consistant brand.
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