Always judge a book by its classic design cover

Penguin by Design by Phil Baines. Penguin £13.99

Design cognoscenti have always valued the Penguin aesthetic; book-lovers have always cherished their dog-eared Penguin paperbacks.

But it’s only in the last few years that the publisher has aggressively marketed its history.

If you’re offered coffee in a chic literary Hampstead household  from page 1 these days you’re as likely to get it in a mug with a 1940s Lady Chatterley’s Lover cover on it; adjourn to the garden and you may be offered a Somerset Maugham deck chair; do the washing up and you may be handed a George Orwell tea towel.

Now Phil Baines, who designed many of the critically acclaimed Great Ideas series which came out last year, has come up with a coffee table book, Penguin By Design, to complete the look.

Mr Baines, who gave a talk at Hampstead Library last night (Wednesday), spent what he describes as a “fantastic” few months in Penguin’s archives at Bristol and Rugby, selecting covers to include in the book.

He said: “For every page of six covers from each series and era I selected there were easily another six just as strong that I could have gone for.

“Anyone who has studied design at art school knows something of the Penguin story but it was a real privilege to get to look into in detail.”

The idea behind Penguins, to offer great writing, attractively presented “for the price of 10 cigarettes” was sufficiently risky a proposition when first mooted that it almost didn’t happen; only Lane and his brothers Richard and John’s offer to fund the project themselves convinced the board of hardback publishers Bodley Head to go ahead.

Within two years the project was so successful it became a firm in its own right. The classic look of the original books – two coloured horizontal bands of colour around a white centre – is perhaps the most iconic and contributed to the early success.

But for Baines, its nothing to get excited about.

He said: “It’s a strong design and collectors are very fond of it, but to be honest, once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”

Not that Mr Baines’ favourite, the 1969 edition of James Joyce’s Ulysees, doesn’t require a second glance to appreciate its quality.

Ostensibly a flat black cover broken only by the author’s name and title in white, it is actually a masterpiece of typography: the combination of the specially redrawn Spectrum font and the book’s reputation add up to a powerful image, “deceptively simple” is Mr Baines’ conclusion.

Less subtle, but perhaps more fun, is the Marshall Mcluhan classic of 1967, The Medium is the Massage, which took design beyond the covers and integrated it completely throughout the book.

Mcluhan, best known for conveniently appearing in a cinema queue to resolve Woody Allen’s argument in the 1977 movie classic Annie Hall, worked with leading designer Quentin Fiore to illustrate such pithy (and in an era of Brit Art, still apposite) aphorisms as “art is whatever you can get away with”.

Legend has it the book was originally to be titled The Medium is the Message, but that typographical gremlins at Penguin changed it, coming up with something even better than Mcluhan could come up with.

Mostly, though, the genius was intentional

Mr Baines, 46, explains: “Like any business there have been high and low points, but there are more ups than downs.

“I bought my first Penguin, a Francois Sagan novel, in the 1960s and I’ve over 500 now.

“I buy them for the covers and it means I read a lot of good things that I otherwise wouldn’t.

“But compared to some in the Penguin collectors’ clubs, what I have is nothing.

“So many are printed that they really aren’t worth much £2 or £3 normally, although there’s a few rarer ones.

“Massacre, by the French satire cartoonist Sine, is one that is sought after.

“There was a great controversy about it because it was said to be sacrilegious, and although the board debated it and agreed to go ahead and publish, Lane subsequently snuck into the warehouse and destroyed most of the stock himself.

“It goes for £14 or £15 now.”

Check your bookshelves now – you’ve probably got a few modern, democratic classics of your own.