Woebot
Well-known member
There's an excellent book out at the moment:"Penguin By Design". I think it's to sync up with their 70th anniversary. I know these covers are the pet love of a few people who post here, but I hadn't really taken on board how distinctive and wonderful their design was. Simon has mentioned to me that the Penguin ethos was informed by a wish to make knowledge widely available and cheap, made possible by the paperback format. So I guess for a long time they were engaged in some kind of cultural project. It must be that the covers were imbued with this lofty intent, so consistent and thoroughly well concieved do they appear.
Things do seem to tail off in the mid nineties, but I'm not sure that this doesnt actually signal the way in which these objects are charged with their own era, that they gain a power from "oozing zeit", though there is a sense, post MM Kaye's 'Far Pavilions' (1979) that the company needed to pander to the market a bit and strive for profitably, though having said that there's some fantastic covers after that date. Roald Dahl's 'Switch Bitch' for instance is a monster, I can really recall the menace his adult books exuded to one as a child.
Things do seem to tail off in the mid nineties, but I'm not sure that this doesnt actually signal the way in which these objects are charged with their own era, that they gain a power from "oozing zeit", though there is a sense, post MM Kaye's 'Far Pavilions' (1979) that the company needed to pander to the market a bit and strive for profitably, though having said that there's some fantastic covers after that date. Roald Dahl's 'Switch Bitch' for instance is a monster, I can really recall the menace his adult books exuded to one as a child.