Great Ideas 4: All 20 Covers

I finally have high-quality scans of all 20 covers for the next round of Penguin's Great Ideas. They are the work of David Pearson (art directing and designing), Phil Baines, Catherine Dixon and Alistair Hall. And they're gorgeous. I especially like this witty cover for Robert Louis Stevenson's An Apology for Idlers...


..but they're all ace. As usual, part of the joy of these books will be found when holding them as physical objects, with all of the embossing, debossing and other such tricks making an encounter with these little books a sensous, tactile, three-dimensional experience (at least for a book tragic like myself).

Click each cover for a big high-resolution version.





















My only complaint, as before with this series, is that many of these are extracts from bigger works, which seems to go against the whole founding ethos of Penguin Books ('COMPLETE UNABRIDGED' as the first Penguin covers had it).

Great Ideas Round 4

As they did in August 2008, Penguin are planning another 20 of their Great Ideas books for August 2009. Only a few of the covers are available as yet, but it would seem that they're going with purple as the single colour used (the first three series used red, blue and green).







This last, textless cover is appropriate for Writings from the Zen Masters. If I'm not mistaken, that tiny purple artist's seal is a stylised Penguin.




Some of the other titles suggest a certain amount of barrel-scraping: Shakespeare's On Power, for example, appears to be bits from his plays presented out of context. On the other hand, Robert Louis Stevenson's An Apology for Idlers ("An irresistible invitation to reject the work ethic and enjoy life’s simple pleasures, such as laughing, drinking and lying in the open air.") sounds like just my cup of tea.

At the moment I'd imagine these covers to be mostly the work of David Pearson, but I'm willing to be proved wrong.

UPDATE: Phil Baines, one of the designers, has let me know who's behind these beauties. "Hi, same four designers as previously, David Pearson (art directing and designing), Phil Baines, Catherine Dixon and Alistair Hall."

Of those shown above, Orwell and Johnston are by Pearson, Locke and Kant are by Dixon; de Maistre by Baines, and the Zen book is by Hall.