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.

Zandra Rhodes's 1970s Penguins

A couple of weeks ago I posted the covers by Sir Peter Blake for the 1950s entries in the upcoming Penguin Decades series. Now its time to jump two decades on, to the covers that punk-influenced (and influencing) textile designer Zandra Rhodes has created for the 1970s books.

 

 

 

I particularly like the Susan Hill cover, while the Daphne du Maurier doesn't seem unsettling enough. I'm not sure what embossing/debossing/varnishing treatments will be used on these (if any), as that could add greatly to the tactile, textile-aping effect. We'll see closer to the time. And again, there's one cover missing--William Trevor's young-psycho-on-the-prowl novel The Children of Dynmouth.

UPDATE: Here's the previously missing Trevor cover:

Two decades are still to come: the 1960s, with covers designed by the great Alan Aldridge, and the 1980s, with covers designed by John Squire (once of potential-squandering band The Stone Roses). I'm excited by the prospect of the former, and worried by the prospect of the latter (unless Squire has moved on from his Jackson-Pollock-aping-but-with-fruit-nailed-on paintings).

AA Gathering

In a cunning attempt to read books without having to find space for them in the house, I rejoined my old uni library. It has a large number of books on my list of things I want to read which are out of print, and so ought to save me a bit of cash. It also has a motherlode of old Penguins, which is great. Unfortunately, many of them have been insensitively rebound minus their covers, which is less so.

One of my recent borrowings was an old book by John Bowen, The Birdcage, a daring-in-its-time book from 1960 about a young media couple from London who split up, and one gets involved in tracking down an old Edwardian playwright, while the other gets involved in gay cruising. It was good, not great, but a nice enough way to spend 190 pages (and has been resurrected as a Faber Find, I see).

In tracking down the original cover, I found that it was a nifty Alan Aldridge illustration, making use of phrases lifted from the novel (click for much bigger versions of all covers).



Aldridge (and his Ink Studios) is best known now as the graphic designer behind much of the Beatles' best stuff, as well as the picture book and animated film The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper Feast. The film was played frequently on Australia's public broadcaster during children's viewing in the early '80s, and I remember being mesmerised by it every time it came on.



He did a lot of work for Penguin in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the best known was for the science-fiction classics and classics-to-be which that publisher began reprinting (including Make Room! Make Room!, more recent editions of which are discussed here).










Here are some of his other Penguin covers...













..and some of his Penguin Crime covers...







Aldridge is still going strong. His website is here, and a recent exhibition of his work was a rousing success.

I'll leave you with one last cover because the title is wonderful (in a way that somehow suggests that the book itself is unreadable).