Penguin By Design: A Cover Story 1935 To 2005

by Phil Baines

Ever since the creation of the first Penguin paperbacks in 1935, their jackets have become a constantly evolving part of Anglo-American culture and design history. By looking back at seventy years of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0713998393
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.6" x 0.7" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

Great gift for book/art lovers

As a book lover as well as an art lover, I wanted this beautiful book as soon as I saw it. So I bought it and then realized it was a perfect birthday gift for a friend who is a graphic artist and an admirer of classic Penguin book design. He loved it, of course. So then I had to order another one for myself. Definitely a keeper.

Penguin love

Among the first books I ever stole (being poor) were Penguins, because they were the most interesting, the best designed, and -- oh I don't know -- the most "bookish"? I wanted to be (would become) a writer. I was stupid-young, self-absorbed, pliably amoral -- and broke. Now here's the company's entire story told through covers. Pictorial. Visceral. Brilliant. More love per exhibit than a non-bibliophile can imagine. Now that I have an income I buy hundreds of book I don't especially need in flagrant pay-back mode. Thank you, Penguin. My first love.

Covering creativity

What a loving tribute to Allen Lane, the visionary who founded Penguin Books in 1935. Few publishers have consistently put their best `face' forward year after year over thousands of titles and I find it surprising that this Penguin cover history hasn't been written before 2005. Admittedly most of their covers until the Fifties, though distinctive in the three-tier horizontal design, were not that creative but things slowly changed no doubt because of market pressure from other paperback publishers. I thought Penguin covers really took of in 1962 with the use of Romek Marber's simple cover grid. Pages 104-5 in the book show eighteen brilliant covers using simple graphics with black, green and red inks. The grid cover style ran into the seventies with the non-fiction Pelicans and nicely still using everybody's favorite type: Helvetica. Author Phil Baines has done a lot of research for the book though it is basically visual with excellent short text pieces for the various title genres. A nice touch is spread of forty-eight Penguin logos from 1935 to 2005 at the back of the book and it is this kind of editorial thoughtfulness that makes the book so interesting. ***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

Beautiful & illuminating

I picked this up because of the book's physical beauty, but I've just read it in one sitting, couldn't put it down--a fascinating window into 20th-century British cultural history as well as book design.