Much Ado About Penguins

 

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."

Comments

[Pixel Kid]

I like the Henry V & Midsummer Nights Dream covers the best out of these. Nice finds!

[davidthedesigner]

Ooh, Nice. I like a bit of Gentleman. Especially his Charing Cross tube station (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charing_Cross_tube_station ).

But I suspect these covers were actually printed CMYK, rather than 'black and up to four other colours'. Can you get your linen tester out and confirm, Richard?

(PS: do you think we ought to explain what a linen tester is?)

[Peter Cooper]

It's not so much the illustrations as the use of Helvetica that makes these covers great to me. Helvetica can be a bit hit or miss but for some reason it looks really.. "fresh" here. Probably because Helvetica is almost never used on fiction books anymore.

[Richard]

David, I've got King Lear in front of me which is printed using three specials and black.

[davidthedesigner]

Interesting - do you think David Gentleman had to persuade Penguin to print spot colours?

[Simon]

these are lovely
especially Othello

[Mary-Laure]

This summer, I gorged on Shakespeare plays, many of which I bought at used-books stores, and I really grew to love the design of those old Penguins (though truth be told, they are not very convenient to read because all the notes are at the end of the volume...). Nothing like the HIDEOUS Arden Shakespare collection, are real deterrent... I blog about different things, including books, and just posted a picture a few days ago that you may like, about old Penguin editions of Nancy Mitford's books. You can check it out at
http://mary-laure.blogspot.com/
(just scroll down to Nancy Mitford...)

[Kev Mears]

I'm really enjoying going through my old penguins, to see what I've got, and in turn it has re-enthused me to read more this year.

In true male, list-making fashion I've found a great site called www.anobii.com that you might be interested in, because you can compare lots of different covers of the same book.

[Simon]

much ado about puffins

ha

[Richard]

Ooh, I like it. A cross-brand joke. Nice.

[Keir]

there was something funny going on with the colours on those compare these three witches:

1970
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14168877@N04/1477825200/in/pool-penguinpaperbackspotters/
1974
http://www.flickr.com/photos/scatterkeir/2063925674/in/pool-penguinpaperbackspotters/
1978
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14168877@N04/1965630248/in/pool-penguinpaperbackspotters/

one would expect some to be more faded than others, but it looks like more than that to me.

[Richard]

I suppose it's feasible Keir that they changed colours when reprinting. Perhaps the first version was considered too dark. Then different pigments fade at different rates, as The Lazy Aussie has just pointed out to me (pardon the schoolboy joke):

http://theworstofperth.com/2008/01/31/tit-one/

[Keir]

I was thinking about pigment fade rates recently - I noticed that a lot of late 60s modern classics have an odd look like this - http://www.flickr.com/photos/scatterkeir/2073614335/in/pool-penguinpaperbackspotters/ - I've seen it fairly often during that period, presumably they changed what they were doing after that.