It may seem a little unfair to return so soon to a designer and publisher that I’ve already covered on this blog, but I was so tickled by this story when I heard it that I couldn’t wait to share it. Last week I went to talk given by one-time Penguin in-house designer, now freelancer, David Pearson, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Entitled ‘Money for Old Rope – A Revivalist Approach to Modern Book Design’, it was really just an illustrated run through of Pearson’s career and the books he loves.
His time at Penguin coincided with a concerted effort at the publisher to make sense of (and, perhaps, make money from) its own design history. Pearson was behind Penguin By Design, the book that tells that design story, did much of the research for Seven Hundred Penguins (a marvelous brick of a book containing nothing but images of book covers) and was in charge of the look of such series as Pocket Penguins and Great Ideas.
What I didn’t know, though, was that he was also responsible for the 2007 redesign of the Penguin Popular Classics series, the cheapo, no-introduction, no-scholarly notes edition originally brought out to counter the threat of Wordsworth Classics. The previous look had been full bleed artwork with a tan-coloured oval title box towards the top. They were, to be charitable, twee in the extreme. To be uncharitable, they were horrid.
Penguin ran an internal competition to come up with a comprehensive overhaul of the series. Five designers submitted, and Pearson won with a super-plain, type-only design featuring modern Gill Sans lettering, a doubled up logo featuring two dancing penguins (to denote, perhaps rather obliquely, the ‘popular’ aspect) and the £2 price tag, prominently, even proudly, displayed. The cover was an equally restrained maroon. The office was, Pearson says, ecstatic about the design… until someone said, almost wistfully, that they preferred it to the ‘proper’ Penguin Classics. At which point everyone froze.
Why would anyone spend £6.99 on, say, Dracula, not to mention £14.99 for Coralie Bickford-Smith’s lovely cloth-covered hardback – both of which feature the full scholarly treatment of preface, chronology, introduction, further reading, a note on the text, plus 50 pages of appendices and notes, when the £2 version, containing just the novel, looks so good? The Classics series is obviously where the money is to be made, and the reputation upheld, and that could not be put in jeopardy. Pearson was sent away with the brief – unique in his and probably many a designer’s career – to make the thing look worse.
Not wanting to mess with the type, or the layout, he decided on the colour, and after much deliberation settled on the lurid lime green that we have seen splashed across bookshops, a colour so uncommonly disgusting that none of the printer’s standard pigments came near it, and it had to be specially mixed.
