Puffin Magic

I've been wanting to post about this for a while, but my camera has been uncooperative until today--this was not a book I was going to press flat in the scanner. It's Phil Baines's Puffin by Design, designed by Tom Sanderson, a companion to 2005's Penguin by Design. And it's a beauty!

A comprehensive and beautifully illustrated to 70 years of some of the most gorgeous children's books in publishing, this book is heaven to anyone interested in book design. Have a look at some of the inner spreads (click every image in this post for much bigger versions).

 
Perhaps best of all, though, is that cover, designed by Tom Sanderson. It's a photo, not a manipulated image. Sanderson was kind enough to let me use this image of its construction.

Having read this, I have a deep urge to revisit the books of my youth. Looking through the covers collected here has reminded me of numerous books I loved when I found them on school library shelves, but which had vanished into the deep storage of my memory in the intervening years--books which, more often than not, I first took down from the shelf because of the cover art.

Fourth Glimpse

Another Great Idea cover:

I'm wondering if there's some detail we can't see here, as the usual quote from the work is not visible in this scan.

While talking of the Great Ideas, have a look at this Flickr set from designer Phil Baines. It includes photos of the making of his covers in this series.

More substantial posts are a-coming, by the way. It's just that I'm on leave from work, and enjoying reading (and watching old French crime movies) like a man possessed.

Second Glimpse

...and another: (UPDATE: by Phil Baines--see here for behind-the-scenes photos)

Penguin Great Ideas Round 5: A First Glimpse

The fifth and final set of 20 Great Ideas books from Penguin is set for August 2010. The first three covers have leaked out into the world, so here they are. I imagine that David Pearson is the man behind the overall look, with other designers contributing.

UPDATE: The top and bottom covers are by Phil Baines, with the middle cover by David Pearson.

The Great Ideas books always look so nice that I'm willing to overlook the fact that Penguin is also publishing something called Psychic Cats in August, a completely non-ironic book of bullshit by the author of An Angel Called My Name: Inspiring True Stories from the Other Side, and other such nonsense.

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.

 

 

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.