The covers: Books v. Cigarettes (series III)
Far be it from me to imply that laziness has ever gripped a Penguin design department, but even the briefest look through the company’s archive presents a very clear pattern: Penguin have often turned to the humble circle in order to solve a design brief [14–18]. So obvious is this trend (there are literally hundreds of examples) that when it came to designing George Orwell’s Books v. Cigarettes (Great Idea no. 57), the revival of the big circle felt like a fitting tribute to this quintessentially Penguin author.
Adopting Romek Marber’s Penguin crime grid [19], the cover suggests that a cigarette stub (or is that a bullet hole?) has actually punctured the book’s cover, fatally wounding it.
20. The Daughter of Time, 1961. Cover design by Romek Marber.
With Penguin’s ‘crime green’* already in place as our series colour, all that remained was to persuade Penguin that an extra colour was required. Red had made fleeting appearances in Romek’s own crime covers – usually to denote blood [20] – and such sparing use of embellishment was symptomatic of Penguin’s early rigour. Although it didn’t make me very popular with the other designers, its addition to our palette felt like a fitting indulgence for one of the list’s biggest-selling authors.
The typeface used is Intertype Standard (a version of Berthold’s Akzidenz Grotesk) and this was directly lifted from a selection of previous Penguin covers [21].
Early titles in Romek’s crime series featured minimal use of capitalisation, so this model was retained for our own version, for example using ‘cigarettes’ instead of ‘Cigarettes’.
Overprinting† also makes an appearance here, in what is one of our looser interpretations of a typographic cover.
* In the mid-sixties, Penguin’s covers relied heavily on a seriesspecific colour-coding system: orange for fiction, green for mystery & crime, pink for travel & adventure, and so on.
† Printing one color over another, instead of ‘knocking out’ the background color.
