Penguin by Design

It's hard to think of a better way to celebrate the publisher's 70^th birthday than with this superb and copiously illustrated history of iconic Penguin cover design.

Baines provides a brief overview of the company's history, but his main focus is on the activities of the art department and the thinking that has informed the designers' decisions.

Allen Lane's vision for a paperback imprint was famously inspired by the lack of cheap, good-quality reading material to be found as he waited at Exeter station one weekend. His idea was refined and added to by his brothers Richard and John, all of whom were directors of publisher The Bodley Head. When the board refused to back the idea, the brothers decided to finance the project themselves.

The first Penguins - the name was apparently suggested by secretary Joan Coles - appeared in 1935, to disbelief from the rest of the book trade; they were an immediate success and Penguin Books became a separate company at the beginning of 1936. One year later, three million Penguins had been sold.

The initial cover designs were very simple (the famous tripartite horizontal grid) and applied across fiction and non-fiction (Pelican) titles. As Lane expanded the list, however, this grid was altered, replaced and abandoned whenever appropriate.

A succession of talented designers continued the evolution of cover design. After the war, Jan Tschichold, the most famous typographer of the day, took over for two years; he refined the tripartite cover, wrote a set of Composition Rules and resigned the logo. Text designer Hans Schmoller took up where Tschichold had left off, insisting on exacting standards.

By the 1960s, technological advances in typesetting and printing gave greater scope to jacket design. Art Director Germano Facetti commissioned a new design grid from Romek Marber, which was applied across many of the lists (Pelicans, Crime, the topical Penguin Specials). Other series received more individual looks (for example, David Gentleman's woodcut illustrations for the New Penguin Shakespeare and Alan Aldridge's distinctly psychedelic science fiction covers).

The 1970s were a financially uncertain period and led to a cutback in the number of titles published. Allen Lane died in 1970, Facetti left in 1972, and Schmoller retired in 1976; by the end of the decade it looked as though design inspiration had also deserted the company.

Baines describes a 'certain politeness in much of the typography of the early 1980s' - which itself is a polite way of putting it. Many of the covers for the fiction titles from this time have dated horribly (did anyone think they were OK at the time?), but thankfully the non-fiction jackets retained high standards, employing witty graphics to express ideas.

Things began to look up again in the 1990s. The little Penguin 60s reminded readers of the company's pioneering heritage, and the Penguin Essentials showed that a series of covers could be designed by several illustrators and designers but still retain a degree of cohesion. Modern Classics returned, with a classy design template, and the Classics had another much-needed facelift.

In a fiercely competitive market, Penguin are back on track. And even if the little waddling bird is sometimes hard to spot on the book these days, somehow one subliminally knows that the paperback in question is a Penguin paperback. Could there be a better outcome for designer and publisher alike?