Insomnia

Having had a go at a cover of a book by Charlie Huston recently (the one with the much-used stock image with a vampire fang inexpertly added), I have to redress the balance now. I just got hold of his newest novel, Sleepless, a noirish science-fiction story about a Los Angeles police detective trying to do his job in the midst of a plague causing total sleeplessness hitting the world. And the cover of the UK edition, published by Orion, is excellent and quite unusual. But what is excellent about it is quite hard to show online.

Online images of the cover look like this:

In the flesh the front and the spine are at first nothing but a regular pattern of white dots on black: there doesn't seem to be anything there. But if you tilt it or look at it from a distance (or, I found, through a camera viewfinder), the image, title and author name appear. To get something of the effect, look at the small versions below, then click for the full-sized versions. Really, though, you probably need to see the physical object--bookshops should soon be full of people squinting at this book, trying to get to grips with it.

Unhelpfully, no designer is credited on my copy (the Commonwealth-outside-the-UK edition), so if anyone in the UK sees the dustjacketed hardback, and it has a designer listed, I would love to know who came up with this.

John Squire's 1980s Penguins

In the 1980s, Penguin's usually high design standards seemed to desert them for a while. Even the company's official design history, Phil Baines's Penguin by Design, admits this, noting of management directives at the time that "their effect on the cover designs might best be described as 'varied'. By the early 1980s many Penguin books, with their insensitive combinations of type and image, looked like the cheapest in the bookshop."

For the final five books in the Penguin Decades series (see the 1950s here, the 1960s here and the 1970s here), artist John Squire (once of the Stone Roses) was approached to do the covers. I mentioned before that I was a bit trepidatious as to what he might come up with, given that I'm no fan of his art (which often seemed to desperately ape Pollock and the like, without adding anything new). But these covers are actually very nice. The have the feel of earlier Penguins, while also suiting the 1980s as well--they're what Penguin books of that decade might have looked like in an alternative universe of wiser design choices.

 

  

  

  

 

As an example, here are a couple of the original '80s paperbacks.

 

 

This is How to Do It

You're a publisher printing a series of classic books to raise money for AIDS relief (through the (RED) organisation). You want them to be eye-catching and beautiful. You make them look like these--absolutely stunning. (Click for huge versions.)

 

  

  

  

  

  

 

I asked Jim Stoddart, Art Director at Penguin Press, about who did each cover and how they came about. This is what he had to say: "We’re starting with a series of 8 titles in this collaboration with the Aids awareness fund (RED), with the prospect of putting more titles into this series in the near future. Each cover switches the usual black of Penguin Classics for the (RED) red and instead of using an image we’re using a quote from the text of the book, and I’m aiming to commission a unique typographer for each cover."

The designers responsible are as follows:

Anna Karenina designed by Fuel
Dracula designed by Non-Format
Great Expectations designed by Stefanie Posavec (Penguin Press Art Dpt)
The House of Mirth designed by Nathan Burton
Notes From Underground designed by Gray318 (Jon Gray)
The Secret Agent designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Penguin Press Art Dpt) (interviewed here)
Therese Raquin designed by Jim Stoddart (Penguin Press Art Dpt)
The Turn of the Screw designed by Studio Frith

I promised myself I would not buy books I already owned even if the new covers were amazing. But then again, this is for charity...

Smoking, and Now with Fangs

Here's a cover image we've seen before which has been used more than once, and now I've found it being used again (this time with the not entirely convincing addition of a fang).

 

I know this is a feebly brief post, but there is stuff going on behind the scenes, including a series of interviews with some extremely talented designers coming up.

A correction, an apology, and some puzzle books

First up, I draw your attention to an important correction regarding the last post: those covers were originally going to be by Alan Aldridge, but in fact the covers I showed were the work of Allen Jones. More info there. Many apologies for the misattribution.

Now, this blog is generally pretty much in awe of Penguin Books and its design work (and history), but that doesn't mean we'll admire everything. I present these three covers, which combine a current craze I find disproportinately irritating with an unattractive variation on the classic Penguin look.

 

  

  

Allen Jones's 1960s Penguins

UPDATE: Well, this is embarrassing. These covers are not the work of Alan Aldridge (The Clockwork Orange sketch is the only work by him shown below).  They are in fact the work of Allen Jones, in collaboration with Penguin art director John Hamilton. This makes particular sense in the context of The Clockwork Orange, as it was Jones' sculptures of women turned into erotic furniture that inspired (in the sense that the film-makers nicked his ideas since they were unwilling to pay him) some of the set design of Kubrick's film of the book (see Alex's favourite moloko bar).

 

I apologise for the misleading information, which came from an early and now incorrect promotional website.

Sandwiched between the 1950s and the 1970s, here are the 1960s, Penguin Decades style. The artist and designer behind these five covers is Alan Aldridge (from whose work I did a big selection here), who did a huge number of covers for Penguin in the '60s and '70s, appropriately enough. The authors represented here are the great Beryl Bainbridge, David Lodge, Anthony Burgess, Margaret Drabble and Barry Hines.

 

  

  

  

  

These ought to pop out on the shelves like jars of sweets. I especially like the cover for A Clockwork Orange, which fits the book beautifully while getting away from the stylised portraits of Alex that are often used. Speaking of which, I found an earlier sketch for that cover, showing a direction Aldridge decided not to pursue.

I just have the 1980s books to display now, with covers by John Squire. I have tracked down three of the five covers, so I hope to post them soon.