I first fell in love with the art of paperback covers at school in the 1970s. I had always adored books and had been brought up in a house packed to the rafters with them – and, much to my partner’s annoyance, I still live in a home like that.
The vast majority of the paperbacks on my father’s shelves that I was interested in reading were the classic, colour-coded Penguin books created by graphic designer Edward Young for the imprint’s founder, Allen Lane. One of Young’s first jobs was being dispatched to London Zoo to sketch penguins to create the publisher’s logo. When he returned to the office, he reportedly complained, “My God, how those birds stink!”
Thanks to Young’s subsequent coding, when I reached up to choose my next read, it was simple to spot the genre – green for my favourite crime writers such as Josephine Tey and Margery Allingham; orange for general fiction such as Evelyn Waugh and, ahem, D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”.
But in the classroom we were studying “Hamlet”, and we were given the Penguin Shakespeare with a cover by the British artist Paul Hogarth, depicting a raven sitting on a skull. I was transfixed. Next came “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, with Hogarth’s creepily grinning ass’s head emerging from a floral wreath.
It would be no exaggeration to say that Hogarth’s work helped me to understand Shakespeare as being eternally modern and slightly dangerous. If only my schoolboy self had had the same experience with Dickens. Even today, my desert-island browse would be “Penguin By Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005” by Phil Baines. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
I have never lost this early fascination with paperback design, and it is an art in which the UK excels. Proof of this is in the latest releases by Vintage. Founded by legendary American publisher Alfred A. Knopf in 1954 and now under the Penguin Random House umbrella, Vintage is the second-biggest classics publisher in the UK, with over 10 million of its Red Spine editions sold since they launched 17 years ago. Now it has introduced a major redesign, the 20 titles involved including “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller, “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” by Jeanette Winterson, and Christy Brown’s “My Left Foot”.
To create the new cover designs, Vintage has commissioned an impressive roster of artists, photographers and illustrators from around the world, such as the Chilean Diego Becas (“The Savage Detective” by Roberto Bolaño), the American artist Idris Habib (“Native Son” by Richard Wright) and Whooli Chen from Taiwan (“The Joy Luck Club” by Amy Tan).
I was reminded of the power of covers several years ago while working at Wallpaper*, when a reader commented that one reason they loved the magazine was that “it makes my Ikea coffee table look better.” These new Vintage Classics should do the same for your bedside table. And they will certainly impress your fellow commuters, cover-art cognoscenti or not.