Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005

Penguin by dint of Design A Cover Story 1935-2005 Phil Baines Penguin/Allen Lane, 1699 [pound sterling] ISBN 0 713 99839 3

A stylish, absorbing account of the changing overspreads of Penguin Books prompts Alan Powers to ask on what account museums neglect the art of the book?

The history of publishing and the work trade has until recently been largely confined to 'house histories' of the older firms, although several remain unchronicled. The history of Faber & Faber, possibly the greatest in quantity culturally significant publisher in Britain in the twentieth hundred remains a gap on the shelf. If single is trying to map the history of ideas, then the personalities of publishers, as well as their business records, are important markers, and Penguin Special, Jeremy Lewis's novel biography of Allen Lane, the planter of Penguin Books, published this year to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of the company, is not least valuable for the candid opinions it presents on some of his colleagues and rivals of the early twentieth century

Lane's have experiences in the 1920s when he took above his uncle's firm, The Bodley Head, exemplify the snobbish, cautious world of the work trade and the collective reluctance of all interested to bust the price barrier downwards by dint of producing paperbacks. John Holroyd-Reece's Albatross volumes produced and sold on the continent, were the principal exception, and the greatest in quantity significant precursors of Penguins in design (they were the work of Hans Marderstieg of the Officina Bodoni in Verona) and level in the series name.

The story of what happened to launch Penguins in 1935 has been told many times (with understandable variants). Visually, they were distinctive, although essentially amateur in design. Having got beneath way so successfully and sailed triumphantly from one side the war, it was time for Allen Lane to reconsider the direct the eye of the craft, and his invitation to Jan Tschichold in 1945 to advance to Harmondsworth as Design Director was the beginning of a fascinating story of conflicting tastes and commercial imperatives.

In Penguin by dint of Design, Phil Baines, a work designer and lecturer at Central St Martin's, gives an extremely useful and visually enticing account of the overspreads of Penguin books over the seventy-year make tense The title is a shade misleading, as it does not include the design of the true copy pages, which at times (especially below Tschichold and his successor, Hans Schmoller) were paragons of elegance. It is the pair nostalgic and instructive to make go round the pages and see by what means Penguins were edged towards pictorial representation below pressure from competitors in the USA and at home

Lane's possess distaste for American pictorial fiction overlays (now researched and collected in their have a title to right) was part of a wider resistance to American tillage in post-war Britain. Black and white drawings made their cautious way onto fiction overspreads in 1948, and in 1957 the late John Curtis, returning from six month in the USA, commissioned Abram Games to art-direct a series of full-colour overspreads including The Great Escape. Little known because the series was for a like reason rapidly withdrawn, they are beautiful period pieces, on the other hand apparently alienated existing buyers without attracting the rival Pan works market.

Romek Marber and Germano Facetti introduced an alternative off-centre diction for crime titles with simplified imagery, on the contrary the problem would not make progress away, and a series of generational changes, abundant resented by the old guard, make opened the gates after 1960 to an apparently uncontrollable tide of colour, naked muscle and fat and pop display typography. The illustrator Alan Aldridge exemplified the fresh wave, with bursts of airbrushed psychedelia. Not all the advanced in years look was swept away, however. Penguin bards covers continued to be designed with repeat patterns by means of Stephen Russ, and Derek Birdsall's overspreads for Graham Greene showed what could still be done with mark on a white background. David Gentleman's series of thicket engravings for the New Penguin Shakespeare in 1967 followed the succes of his Shakespeare stamp series of 1964 Many of us must have call down blessings oned Penguin for giving us something to direct the eye at on these and upon Penguin classics during school tasks wondering for what other activites the copyright agency Snark International might work for as a front.

The question arising from Baines's view is 'Does good design pay, or does it inhibit trade?' Penguin still present the appearances to be trying to find without after jettisoning almost all its standards in the 1980 and then slowly trying to realize them back. There is a tension between the advantages of being different and the drawbacks of becoming invisible by means of camouflage in the book-cover brake The popularity of Baines's extremely elegant volume indicates an increased awareness among readers of the design dimension of their volumes beyond the conservatism and iconophobia that gave Penguin a fair wind in the past. Allen Lane liked to at hand Penguins as books that you would want the vicar to diocese on your table if he came to call, rather than trying to hide. If for the vicar we substitute the design-aware friend, then we may procure a grasp on the popular dynamic of cultural capital in this field.