Poster from cover of Moby Dick by Herman Melville, art by Tony Millionaire

Poster from cover of White Noise by Don Delillo, art by Michael Cho, design by Paul Buckley

Then the very delightful design blog Kitsune Noir has begun the Kitsune Noir Poster Club by asking five artists to produce a poster based on a book they love. The results of which include another take on Moby Dick:

Poster inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, by Mark Weaver

But I think my two favourites are these, coming from opposite ends of the austerity scale:

Poster inspired by David Foster Wallace’s Infinte Jest, by Cody Hoyt

Poster inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, by Jez Burrows

The other two titles are Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

And then there’s Penguin designer and, more importantly, ≥ regular Stefanie Posavec, who has a print at 20x200. It’s based on Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, and uses the same technique to visualize the text as she’s used before for On the Road.

Walter Benjamin: A Literary Organism Analysis print, by Stefanie Posavec

I am wishing I had more money right now.

Guys.

Send me money.

I think they did the same with other Orwells at the same time. For a more contemporary example, currently Penguin have an imprint just for James Bond titles, the logo for which is:

Penguin 007 logo. Pictured on the Pentagram-designed Quantum of Solace hardback.

But there must be other examples like this?

And when I say ‘he wastes no time’, I mean he neatly saves himself time by not doing it. He just assumes the line exists. Penguin’s classic cover of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is being used to decorate a mug? Why, this way lies an illiterate (if presumably well-hydrated) public with no appreciation of their literary cultural heritage!

Most peculiarly, he is very upset that some notebooks cost more than the Penguin editions of the actual books from which they take their covers.

It’s depressing because the blank books cost more than the latest Penguin editions of the novels. The Invisible Man? £7.99 with annotations and an introduction by Christopher Priest. Wuthering Heights? The Penguin Popular Classic’s yours for £2.50, or for £6.99 have an annotated edition introduced by Brontë scholar (and Booker prize judge) Lucasta Miller. Nineteen Eighty-Four? £8.99, introduced by no less than Thomas Pynchon.

Surely it would be more depressing if the books cost more than the notebooks? Or, if we think back just three paragraphs in his, admittedly, kind of confusing argument, ‘Allen Lane set up Penguin to try to increase the numbers of people able to afford good books’. And now just look at what this new vulgar era of merchandising has wrought! Oh, it seems to have wrought affordable editions of classic books with introductions by the likes of ‘no less than Thomas Pynchon’. And of course the Penguin Popular Classics, housed in a distinctive green series style by no less then David Pearson and yours for no more than £2.50. How depressing.

Take this as a disclaimer: I used to work in the marketing department of Penguin and I still sometimes freelance for them. I’m also a fan of good book cover design. It’s one of the reasons I started this blog, and it’s one of the things that made my time at Penguin a good time. Because they still routinely produce brilliant designs. And the people in the art department are, in my experience, not just talented. They know they work at a publisher with a remarkable design history. And – if you talk to them about what it means to be in charge of preserving and celebrating that heritage, and about trying to do it justice with their own work – they’re also smart, thoughtful and humble.

Mugs and deckchairs might not be as vital a part of commemorating Penguin’s illustrious design past as histories of the designers responsible or collections of old designs. But if we think that awareness of good design has a way of improving new design (this is both my hunch and my own experience as an occasional ersatz designer), it can hardly be a bad thing. And, denunciations of publishers for selling out and ‘flogging’ themselves aside, the suggestion that it somehow impacts on the books themselves I’m going to politely call unfounded. Because it’s fucking stupid.

AT ANY RATE, the guy who wrote that post should look away now. This will only upset him. (But I think it’ll delight other people.)

Penguin have just released Postcards from Penguin. A box of one hundred postcards for £15 (actually it’s £7.80 at Amazon.co.uk or the Book Depository – which is less than 8p a postcard, bargain hounds), with great work from design legends like Romek Marber, Alan Aldridge and Jan Tschichold. There’s a few more photos at my Flickr page.

Things to note: the box itself was designed by Jim Stoddart; there’s been an admirable attention to detail paid, with several different versions of the back of the cards (all charming); and There must be a Pony! is an amazing title for a book with an amazing, eye-searing cover by Aldridge.

Postcards from Penguin | 9780141044668 | at Amazon | at the Book Depository

I may be slow on the draw, but I will steadfastly refuse to concede that something I have planned to do has been rendered redundant. Call it strength of character.

The series was designed by Stefanie Posavec, and they’re very appealing pocket-sized matte books, written by David Thomson, the critic and author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Unfortunately they’re not really a steal at £7.99. Or if they are a steal, it is the wrong kind of steal. It is the kind of steal where you wonder where your money has gone and maybe you feel taken advantage of. They’re a bit more affordable at Amazon though.

These are the four books (the quotes are from the back covers):

Look, I’m hardly pretty, he seems to say. I sound like gravel; I look rough and tough; and, honest, I don’t give you the soft, foolish answers the pretty boys will give you. You may not like what I say, but you better believe it.

Humphrey Bogart – 9781846140761 – cover – Amazon

Cooper was heroic, of course, in his own mind as much as in his scripts. He was manly, tall, ruggedly handsome. He was a man for a fight.

Gary Cooper – 9781846140778 – cover – Amazon

Ingrid Bergman was far more than just a sweet, virtuous, “natural” Swedish girl - she was a dark sensualist over whom many men might go mad. Her very gaze delivered a climate of adult romantic expectation.

Ingrid Bergman – 9781846140785 – cover – Amazon

She could look demure while behaving like an empress. Blonde, with eyes like pearls too big for her head, she was very striking, but marginally pretty and certainly not beautiful … But it was her edge that made her memorable – her upstart superiority, her reluctance to pretend deference to others.

Bette Davis – 9781846140723 – cover – Amazon

Last November, I interviewed book designer Coralie Bickford-Smith on the Penguin blog about her designs for a set of ten hardback classics, and how they made me want new cloth-bound editions of books more than I wanted, say, food. Or love. Definitely a lot more than I wanted love.

For the interview, I’d send her an image with a question in it, and she’d fill the remaining space with whatever she wanted, and then I’d send her another, and so on. It worked well and I’M NOT MADE OF IDEAS DAMMIT, so with a new set of ten more handsome volumes about to be published, we’ve done the same thing again.

[UPDATE, 9/10: The books are at last available through the Waterstone’s website. (Thank you to sarah b. for spotting them and commenting.)]

So, to recap, the books are published on 5 October, and you want them, or else, I guess you hate things that are nice? The Directorial Tea-Towel is available now, through the pleasingly named ToDryFor.com.

Here’s the full list of the ten books. They are, for the moment, exclusive to Waterstone’s. Titles link to images, ISBNs link to the book’s Waterstone’s page:

Little Women – Louisa May Alcott – 9780141192413
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – 9780141192420
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle – 9780141192437
The Odyssey – Homer – 9780141192444
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson – 9780141192451
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass – Lewis Carroll – 9780141192468
Emma – Jane Austen – 9780141192475
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence – 9780141192482
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – 9780141192499
The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint – William Shakespeare – 9780141192574

And eight of the ten titles from the last set are now available through Amazon and all ten in Canada through Chapters Indigo. Titles link to images, ISBNs to Amazon.co.uk:

Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – 9780141040318
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – 9780141040363
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë – 9780141040356
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – 9780141040370
Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell – 9780141442549
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – 9780141040332
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – 9780141040349
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – 9780140455687
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë – 9780141040387
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde – 9780141442464

Please feel free to leave a comment if you find the books available anywhere else.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, design by gray318

Unfortunately, what with the decline of proper journalism and whatnot, nobody thought to ask the really important question here: What renegade genius working an admittedly low-level job in the publisher’s marketing department suggested keeping the title off the cover?

Last year I was a copywriter at Penguin and wrote a lot of blurbs for the Classics lists. So you get used very quickly to seeing your words on books by some of the greatest writers who ever lived. The job was a joy from start to end and there’s not a lack of things it was a thrill to be able to work on.

But getting to use the iconic language of Orwell’s classic like this, and having the editor take the idea to gray318 (who is, you may know, in a league of his own) and have him come up with this absolutely perfect design across front, back and spine (and throw in a couple of endpapers that would have made great Orwell jackets in their own right), was perhaps the best of a lot of gratifying moments.

Here’s the full design:

Inside front cover

Inside back cover

So thank you Jon Gray, thank you Penguin and thank you George Orwell. You made me a very happy man.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · George Orwell · 9780141191201 · at the Book Depository · at Amazon.co.uk

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