Skip to content

Tag: Penguin

Published May 6, 2011

Penguin Book Cover Mystery: Update

Is this the cover in the painting?

Certainly a lot of people seem to think so and some things do fit. Titus Groan is, of course, the first book in the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake, and this particular Penguin Modern Classics edition was, I believe, first published in 1974. The drawing on the cover (by Mervyn Peake?) is also somewhat similar stylistically to the work of Balthus, mentioned in the title of the painting, so that would make sense I suppose.

However, the features of the faces do not look particularly alike — the features in the painting are more angular — and the hair/shadow to the left of the face on the book cover is notably absent on the cover in the painting. The mood of both seem quite different (to me at least). Can this simply down to artistic license or painterly technique on the part of Hagan?

Other compelling suggestions have been thin on the ground. T.E. Lawrence’s The Mint has been suggested, and there are some similarities to the cover of The Waves by Virginia Woolf, but neither seems quite right and they do not fit with the trilogy alluded to in the title.

There may never be a definitive answer — the artist, Frederick Hagan, died in 2003 — but please let me know if you have any further suggestions or thoughts.

Comments closed
Published May 4, 2011

Penguin Book Cover Mystery

Plant, Trilogy and Balthus, 1982

Do you recognise these books?

Plant, Trilogy and Balthus is going to be part of an exhibition on the work of Canadian painter Frederick Hagan (1918–2003)  at the MacLaren Art Centre this summer and curator Ben Portis would like your helps identifying the Penguin paperbacks in the picture (click the image above for a closer look).

The only other clues we have are that the books form a trilogy and were published prior to 1982.

If you recognise the books or have any further thoughts or suggestions, please leave a comment below or drop me a line and I’ll pass them on to Ben.

Here are the full details of the painting:

Plant, Trilogy and Balthus, 1982
Frederick Hagan (Canadian, 1918–2003)
oil on hardboard
40.4 x 60.6 cm

Thanks!

5 Comments
Published April 11, 2011

Coralie Bickford-Smith | Serious Interview

Alan Trotter entertainingly interviews Coralie Bickford-Smith about her new cover designs for the Penguin Great Food series:

The lettering on the covers is by the talented Stephen Raw, and you can see all the finished designs on the Penguin Books Flickr.

My interview with Coralie is here.

Comments closed
Published March 29, 2011

Penguin Threads Deluxe Classics | Jillian Tamaki

Award-winning Canadian illustrator and cartoonist Jillian Tamaki (Gilded Lilies, Skim and Indoor Voice*) has embroidered (embroidered!) three beautiful cover designs for a new classics series Penguin Threads to be released this Fall. They are all breathtaking.

There are more details and images of the designs on Jillian’s blog.

*Disclosure: Indoor Voice is published by Drawn & Quarterly and distributed by my employer Raincoast Books.

1 Comment
Published March 7, 2011

The Breaking of Eggs: One Book, Three Covers

Books published in both the US and UK will often have different covers in each country. The UK and the US are, after all, two nations divided by a common language. Even so, I was still quite surprised by just how different the cover of UK paperback edition The Breaking of Eggs by Jim Powell (forthcoming from Orion, above right) was from the cover US edition of the same book (published by Penguin, above left).

It was Dan Mogford the designer of the UK paperback who pointed me in the direction of the original US cover, designed by Gregg Kulick. I had, it turned out, seen Gregg’s cover before — it had caught my eye in Paul Buckley’s book Penguin 75 — I just hadn’t realized it was the same book that Dan had just designed the cover for!

As Dan and Gregg’s treatments were so different, I thought it might be informative to ask them both about their designs. In the process, I came across Nathan Burton’s design for the UK hardcover edition of The Breaking of Eggs (published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, above middle) — another, altogether different, interpretation of the same story. I thought it would be interesting to ask Nathan what he remembered from his design brief as well.

I’m grateful to all three designers for sharing their thoughts on their very different directions…

Gregg Kulick:

The Breaking of Eggs is the story of an old curmudgeon who learns to take down all of the walls he built around himself and really enjoy life. As a child, he flees Poland to escape the war and settles in France. As an adult he becomes a travel writer who focuses on the old communist block and is very much a communist himself. The rest of the world and its excesses annoy him and he shuts himself out. Slowly he breaks down the walls and visits his lost brother in America.

The title refers to a Joseph Stalin quote “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” and could be used as a metaphor for his own life. Or he as a child, he could also have been one of the broken eggs. Regardless, it was his mind that needed to be broken in order to live a truly full life. Which, is why I chose that imagery. The giant exclamation point was a homage to Rodchenko, who was a huge influence on my design as a student and who often used them in his design.

The map in the background just represents some of the places he wrote about as a travel writer. This was more of a request from editorial to show “place” on the cover and I think it was a very nice suggestion.

Nathan Burton:

The publisher had tried a photographic route previously to commissioning me which hadn’t worked so they wanted an alternative approach. Buzz words they came up with were: cafe, espresso, napkin, beer, handwritten notes, cigarette smoke, a guide book on a table, a train. It was a case of combining this with a nod toward an Eastern European aesthetic to come up with the final design.

Dan Mogford:

The previous incarnations of the jacket – on both sides of the Atlantic – had all been fairly quirky and lighthearted and the publishers were keen to open this book up to a different audience. Orion were quite specific about the direction they wanted to go with this – the phrase ‘traditional, sophisticated literary fiction’ was mentioned a few times!

The focus for this version of the jacket was to be the protagonist’s early year’s in Lodz, Poland around 1939 when he was abandoned by his mother. The brief asked for ‘a lonely looking boy in an urban Polish setting ideally with a woman walking away from him’ – this highly specific request meant I was looking at a composite image from the start, it was really a case of finding the right elements within a variety of period photographs then assembling them to tell the story you see in the final composition.

1 Comment
Published February 20, 2011

Penguin Great Food | Coralie Bickford-Smith

The Creative Review has an early look at three of the covers for Penguin’s Great Food paperback series to be released in April.

Designed by the wonderful Coralie Bickford-Smith, each cover draws on a decorative ceramic style relevant to the period of the writing.

Meanwhile, in new article for Fast Company Coralie talks about the inspiration behind her book covers:

“I want these books to be cherished like the literature inside,” says Bickford-Smith of her obsessive attention to detail. “If something is well considered, it will entice. People want to explore it, feel it. That design shines through and connects.”

And, if you missed it, my Q & A with Coralie from 2009 is here.

2 Comments
Published December 22, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

Just to continue the Gatsby theme this week, Penguin UK have been adding more recent and vintage book designs to their Flickr, including this Fitzgerald cover from 1998 (Thanks Alan! Can we get design credits please?).

Running Out of Room — Will Schofield, the chap behind the awesome A Journey Round My Skull, at From The Desk Of…

I love records and books equally, and have collected both with abandon since my teenage years. Luckily I never had a strong vinyl fetish so last year sold a bunch of records and now mainly listen to mp3s. I say luckily because I ran out of room for my books and records around 2003.

“The boxes have now changed, but they are still boxes” — Marshall Poe, author of A History of Communications, on how the internet changes nothing (via Rough Type):

We knew the revolution wouldn’t be televised, but many of us really hoped it might be on the Internet.  Now we know these hopes were false.  There was no Internet Revolution and there will be no Internet Revolution.  We will stumble on in more or less exactly the way we did before massive computer networks infiltrated our daily lives.  Just look around and you will see that the Singularity is not near.  For some reason we don’t want to admit this fact.  Media experts still talk as if the Internet is new, as if it is still evolving, as if it will shortly “change everything.”

And finally…

Fonts in Use — A catalogue of type in use. Like the Book Cover Archive for fonts. Brilliant.

5 Comments
Published September 10, 2010

Something for the Weekend

A series of book cover design concepts for The Infamous Press by Norwegian graphic designer Morten Iveland (via IS050).

Paid by the Joke — The enduring appeal of Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar in The Guardian:

Billy Liar’s longevity is not an example of a tale that is told and told again with a dulling faithfulness; rather, the long life of Billy Liar is a story of reincarnation, of each new generation seizing upon the tale afresh and making the story its own. Its influence may be felt in half a century of creative endeavour, in drama and literature and film, and, perhaps most keenly, in popular music: referenced, for instance, in the video for the Oasis single The Importance of Being Idle, and in a song by the Decemberists, and popping up, too, in many of Morrissey’s lyrics, including the Smiths’ 1984 hit William, It Was Really Nothing.

And if anyone at Penguin is reading, please, please reissue Billy Liar with the Tony Meeuwissen Woodbine cover from the 1970’s (come on, you know you want to):

(image via David The Designer)

If Covers Could Talk — A nice satirical book cover blog, kind of like Unhappy Hipsters for books.

And finally…

W. W. Norton, who have done great job with their Flickr — particularly their book design archive where the above stunner by Gray318 comes from — now have a Tumblr as well. The latest post, at the time of writing, is an animated scene from Stitches, the graphic memoir by David Small. Nice work.

5 Comments
Published August 20, 2010

Something for the Weekend

Psycho Cover — Penguin art director Paul Buckley discusses his new book Penguin 75 with Imprint:

I am very aware of how much product gets put out there that is completely unnecessary, be it music, movies, books, whatever—it seems that for every good piece of culture we experience, we are bombarded with 99 pieces of redundant crap. I’ve been in the industry for awhile, and of course want to show off the great work we do here, but was not going to put out yet another design book and take your money—you can get that in any annual. To me, often more interesting than the covers are the stories, the psychology that created all the variables that led to this cover over the 20 other proposed covers.

Paul has recently updated his Flickr with new covers from the Penguin Ink series, which utilizes art by tattoo artists, as well as the latest additions to the excellent Penguin Graphic Classics series, which have art by contemporary cartoonists.

My interview with Paul and Penguin 75 designer Christopher Brand is here.

Also at Imprint… Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and book editor Eva Prinz (formerly of Abrams and Rizzoli)  talk about their new publishing venture Ecstatic Peace Library.

Writing on the Wall — Andrew Franklin, publisher and managing director of Profile Books,  offers an overview of the current state of the book business in the UK (via Dan Mogford):

Bookshops enliven high streets, create communities of readers and stage author events, while good booksellers encourage reading and shape taste. For most readers, browsing is a key part of deciding what to read, and publishers put huge effort into packaging and presenting their books. Of course many of these activities can migrate online with Facebook groups, online forums, feeds and websites helping to steer readers to the books they will most enjoy. For some online shoppers bookshops are part of this process: they browse in bookshops, write shopping lists and then buy (perhaps more cheaply) online. But no bookshop can be in business as a shop window for other retailers. You don’t have to be hopelessly nostalgic or sentimental to believe something very precious is lost with every bookshop that closes.

And at the other of the spectrum…

Another Reading Revolution — Historian Andrew Pettegree talks about his new book The Book in the Renaissance with The Atlantic (via Shelf Awareness):

The situation really is that the first generation of printers, encouraged by scholars, naturally produced the sort of books these people wanted. But it’s hard to apply this sort of commercial model—this small, bespoke model used for manuscripts—to a new process that produces 300 or more identical items. The irony is that there were plenty of other readers out there. The first printers ignored the groups that we might call pragmatic readers. Literacy was already widely-disseminated in the fifteenth century. There were lots of people who could read but did not habitually buy books, so the trick was to discover how to reach them.

Comments closed
Published August 6, 2010

Something for the Weekend

Patrick Cramsie, author of The Story of Graphic Design, chooses his top 10 graphic design books for The Guardian. The list includes Notes on Book Design by Derek Birdsall.

Type Education — FontShop have released a handful of free typography primers designed for downloading and printing, including ‘Seven Rules for Better Typography’ by Erik Spiekermann.

Frost — Sifting through the Penguin archive in Bristol, writer Gaby Wood profiles the late Eunice Frost, who became an editor at Penguin in the 1930’s and went on to become its first female director, for The Telegraph:

Frost was sharp and, for all her youth and inexperience, in many ways more culturally engaged than the Lane brothers… It was to a large extent thanks to her that Penguin began to publish original work – not just reprinted fiction but the Pelican series of new non-fiction, and the Penguin ‘Specials’ series – quickly produced tracts on various subjects of urgent import. Three weeks after war was declared, for instance, Harold Nicolson was commissioned to write a 50,000-word book entitled Why Britain Is at War, which he delivered two weeks later and which was published a fortnight after that.

Secrets of Life and Death — Artist Jaime Hernandez, co-creator of Love & Rockets, and comics scholar Todd Hignite discuss their new book The Art of Jaime Hernandez with Eric J. Lawrence on KCRW.

Comments closed
Published August 5, 2010

Opportunities and Charm

In a recent op-ed for The Financial Times (registration required), John Makinson, CEO of the Penguin Group, outlined the opportunities e-books offer to publishers:

What is being missed in the debate about the division of digital spoils is the opportunity offered by e-books to authors and readers, as well as to publishers who have the specialist skills to exploit it… [W]e should not forget that the growth of the book market has always been driven not by changes in consumer demand but by the availability of new channels of supply. It was true of supermarkets and book clubs, and it will be true of digital platforms and formats.

While e-books mean that publishers can develop new products that expand on the traditional book, says Makinson, digital technology will also provide them with “rich consumer data” that can inform decisions about pricing and content. Furthermore, social networks and online communities  will allow for greater reader engagement in the publishing process.

According to Makinson, technology will redefine the industry but, so long as publishers are adept at learning new skills, it will enhance their role rather than diminish it. And even with the “explosive growth” of e-books, Makinson is optimistic about print:

Perhaps the charm of the physical book will be lost one day. But I doubt it. Readers of all ages retain a remarkable emotional attachment to the thing. It is portable, convenient and a pleasure to own… There’s life in the old book yet.

(link)

Comments closed
Published August 5, 2010

Coralie Bickford-Smith’s Fitzgeralds

Not only does the talented Coralie Bickford-Smith, senior cover designer for Penguin Press, have a spiffy new website, she has also unveiled her stunning metallic cover designs for Penguin’s new editions of  F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Coralie is now on Twitter, and you can read my Q & A with her here.

Comments closed