NOVEMBER 21, 2007

65 years of impeccable cover designs from a legendary publisher

NONFICTION: Seven Hundred Penguins

For the basic facts on Penguin Books — the venerable imprint founded in Britain in 1935 by Allen Lane, whose goal was to provide great paperback books at low prices — a quick scan of Wikipedia will suffice.

But if you want to get an in-depth look at what made those little, visually impressive Penguin paperbacks so much fun to read, and what made Penguin the first and most enduring global book-publishing brand, you need only pick up Seven Hundred Penguins. The book features riveting full-color cover reproductions of 700 (mostly British) titles, with each page devoted to a single cover. In a welcome nod to realism, the cover images are not always pristine — they look just the way the books might have appeared after sliding out of your back pocket.

More than just retro eye candy, the covers — spanning 1935 to 2000 — are acute high-end core samples of the eras in which they were published and show how graphic design has (and has not) evolved.

Seven Hundred Penguins (Penguin Books; softcover; 713 pages — available from Amazon Canada)

sample covers from Seven Hundred Penguins

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