Happy Birthday Penguin Books...

1970's Penguin Design

Penguin books is, are 75 years old  ( BBC World Service). The world wide publishing company was founded in 1935 by the late (Sir) Allen Lane, 1902 – 1970.

His mission was to provide high quality, paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Essentially this meant that the great unwashed could buy and own books of their own. Literature, poetry, non – fiction and plays were emancipated from the classroom, the library and the University and the man in the street had the chance to educate himself. The books were a great success, so much so that by March 1936, ten months after the company's launch on 30 July 1935, one million Penguin books had been printed.

History
From the outset, design was essential to the success of the Penguin brand. Eschewing the illustrated gaudiness of other paperback publishers, Penguin opted for the simple appearance of three horizontal bands, the upper and lower of which were colour coded according to which series the title belonged to; this is sometimes referred to as the horizontal grid. In the central white panel, the author and title were printed in Eric Gill's sans serif and in the upper band was a cartouche with the legend "Penguin Books".

The initial design was created by the then twenty-one-year-old office junior Edward Young, who also drew the first version of the Penguin logo. The colour schemes included: orange and white for general fiction, green and white for crime fiction, cerise and white for travel and adventure, dark blue and white for biographies, yellow and white for miscellaneous, red and white for drama; and the rarer purple and white for essays and belles lettres and grey and white for world affairs.

Between 1947 and 1949, the great German typographer Jan Tschichold redesigned 500 Penguin books, and left Penguin with a set of influential rules of design principles brought together as the Penguin Composition Rules. Tschichold's work included the woodcut illustrated covers of the classics series (also known as the medallion series), and with Hans Schmoller, his eventual successor at Penguin, the vertical grid covers that became the standard for Penguin fiction throughout the 1950s.

New techniques such as phototypesetting and offset-litho printing dramatically reduced cost and permitted the printing of images and text on the same paper stock. In May 1960, Tony Godwin was appointed as editorial adviser, he sought to broaden the range of Penguin's list and keep up with new developments in graphic design. To this end, he hired Germano Facetti in January 1961, who was to decisively alter the appearance of the Penguin brand. Beginning with the crime series, Facetti canvassed the opinion of a number of designers including Romek Marber for a new look to the Penguin cover. It was Marber's suggestion of what came to be called the Marber grid along with the retention of traditional Penguin colour coding that was to replace the previous three horizontal bars design and set the pattern for the design of the company's paperbacks for the next twenty years.

By the end of the 1960s, Penguin was in financial trouble. Ultimately, the company was bought out by Pearson Longman in August 1970, some six weeks after the death of Allen Lane. A new emphasis on profitability emerged and, with the departure of Facetti in 1972, the defining era of Penguin book design came to an end.

Controversy
Just as Lane well judged the public's appetite for paperbacks in the 1930s, his decision to publish Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence in 1960 boosted Penguin's notoriety. The novel was at the time unpublished in the United Kingdom and the predicted obscenity trial not only marked Penguin as a fearless publisher, it also helped drive the sale of at least 3.5 million copies. Penguin's victory in the case heralded the end to the censorship of books in the UK. In the same tradition of courting controversy, Penguin published Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust which accused David Irving of Holocaust denial. Irving sued Lipstadt and Penguin for libel in 1998 but lost in a widely publicised trial.

Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005
More recently, the design element of the Penguin paperback, was celebrated in the 2005 publication "Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935 – 2005". The book looks back at seventy years of Penguin paperbacks, and charts the development of British publishing, book cover design and the role of artists and designers in creating and defining the Penguin look.