The 1960s is regarded as one of the golden eras for cover design in Penguin’s history. This was largely due to the talents and vision of one man: Italian graphic designer Germano Facetti (1026-2009), head of design from 1962 to 1971. He was given the challenge of modernising Penguin covers to make them more attractive to a younger generation without alienating the existing audience. To help him achieve this, he wanted to define a unified visual identity as he believed it was: “much more important that Penguin established a high standard throughout, rather than swinging from good to bad, cover to cover, as almost all other publishers do.”
One of Facetti’s crowning achievements was the radical overhaul of the Penguin Classics series. Facetti introduced a new black cover design, as he believed it was a more effective colour for selling books. Also, instead of using commissioned woodcut illustrations; he selected images that normally belonged to the period of the book’s first publication. In so doing, he wanted the book covers to communicate something beyond what the story itself was about: so it expressed its historical context and author. In his own words, he was aiming to create: “pictures for construction of a sequence of understanding which leads beyond the text.”
The idea of a black cover was not initially universally embraced by Penguin. However, Facetti was so strong in his conviction he staked a magnum of Champagne to prove his point. He won the wager when a test display in Blackwell’s bookshop, Oxford, led to an impressive increase in the shop’s sales of Penguin Classics.
The books in the photographs are two examples of his work from 1964 and 1965.
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The Penguin logo by Edward Young is easily the most recognisable and iconic in publishing. Less well known, it was named “Frostie” after the first woman to be appointed to the Penguin Board of Directors, Eunice Frost, or her contribution in helping shape one of the most successful stories in publishing history.
The enigmatic and eccentric Eunice Frost joined Penguin in 1937 as a secretary, but soon became the pivotal driving force of its editorial output. She steered the company to broaden their portfolio beyond reprinting fiction to creating their own unique work, including the Pelican and Penguin Modern Painter series (4 of the 16 titles originally published in the 1940s are pictured in the photographs). She was also the one who primarily dealt with the authors, publishers and illustrators and in 1941 she was sent to New York to set up the American branch of Penguin Books.
She described herself as a “literary midwife:” working tirelessly to bring Penguin publications into the world, but, despite becoming the first woman in publishing to receive an OBE, she felt her work went largely unacknowledged and unaccredited. The eminent Art Historian and Editor of the Penguin Modern Painter series, Kenneth Clark reinforces this opinion when he wrote to her in 1954 shortly before the revised editions were due to be published “I would much rather my name were not printed as Editor of your new series because I have done nothing to deserve it. You have done all the work during the last 10 years, and it is high time your name appeared and you got the credit for it.”
Although her name may never have appeared on a single edition of a Penguin book, her association with its logo ensures she remains an implicit, if somewhat invisible, presence to this day.
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Cincinnatus C. is a man condemned to death by beheading for no real discernible crime. He awaits his fate as the sole prisoner of a bleak and ghoulish fortress from where he observes his surroundings and looks back on his life.
Through the eyes of Cincinnatus, Nabokov presents the fabric of reality as a nightmarish puppet theatre, filled with transparent, cardboard cut-out figures, where fear, uncertainty and irrationality reign supreme and to dream is a crime. In stark contrast, Cincinnatus is an opaque, imaginative and complex individual: a dreamer who fails to conform and, as the phrase Nabokov uses to describe the novel, represents: “a violin in a void.”
The novel first appeared serially in the Russian émigré magazine, the Sovremennye zapiski, in 1938. The English translation and cover design of this Penguin first thus is by Nabokov’s son and only child, Dmitri Nabokov, who also collaborated with his father on a of translation of Mikhail Lermontov’s novel, A Hero of Our Time.
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The book cover in the photograph is by the artist, sculptor and writer Michael Ayrton( 1921-75) who was described by Henry Moore as ‘A fascinating side-alley; not mainstream, but a significant eccentric.’ Others were less gracious and merely found him ‘insufferable’ including the actor Sir John Gielgud whom he worked alongside whilst designing stage sets for a 1942 production of Macbeth.
His contrariness and inner conflicts were evident throughout his life. In childhood, his parents, poet Gerald Gould and politician Barbara Ayrton, were indulgent but largely absent, and though he displayed a precocious talent - his cartoons were published by the age of thirteen - he left school at fourteen under somewhat mysterious circumstances. As an adult, he was a womaniser who struggled with feelings of repressed homosexuality and, whilst he cited Picasso as one of his greatest influences, he boasted his own drawing abilities were ten times better and wrote several critical essays on his work including The Master of Pastiche that was presented as a broadcast by the BBC in 1945. In his art he rejected contemporary trends in favour of the Renaissance.
He is most known for his work featuring the Greek myths Icarus, Daedalus and the Minotaur and his fascination and affinity for these tragic figures can be best summed up in his own words:
“we live by myth, inventing it when necessary, returning to it with satisfaction when it seems useful”
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Judging books by their cover
