Some Tschichold Penguins
Why choose the penguin, that blameless but distant avian, as name and brand? Allen Lane was following a German precedent: Albatross Books. Founded in 1931, printing cheap mass-market paperback books with standard sizes, covers bearing author and title only rather than art, with different genres colour-coded. The founders John Holroyd-Reece, Max Christian Wegner and Kurt Enoch chose the name albatross for their new imprint more or less adventitiously, because it is the same word in many European languages. And conceivably (though I don’t know) because of its literary associations, via Coleridge’s Mariner. Or maybe not. Come to think of it, that wouldn’t be a very auspicious association for a new press.
Allen Lane copied Albatross’s style closely when, in 1935, he set up Penguin books. For branding and company name he chose a different bird, though it’s a word that (French: manchot) is not the same across all European languages. The format was copied again when, in 1939, Robert de Graaf created Pocket Books in the USA. Albatross went out of business during World War 2, but Penguin and Pocket Books both thrived. Indeed, in American Pocket Books was so successful that ‘pocket book’ became synonymous with paperback, as in France, where livre de poche is still in use today.
Penguin’s original colour schemes were: orange/white for general fiction, green/white for crime fiction, cerise/white for travel, dark blue/white for biographies, yellow/white for miscellaneous and red/white for drama. They also, more rarely, published belles lettres in purple and white livery.
The enterprise was a great success. Despite selling at a price (sixpence) other publishers thought too low ever to make a profit, the books sold widely. Within a few years a million Penguins were in print. After the war, Penguin redesigned their books.
Between 1947 and 1949 Penguin Books hired Jan Tschichold to standardize Composition Rules and redesign the entire series of paperback and hardback books that could be applied to mass production. Tschichold established the standard for successful book design in Britain, revolutionized typographic principles, and initiated a rebirth of classical book design. He was the first typographer to effectively supervise and design, on such a comprehensive spectrum, well over 500 mass-produced books for a publishing firm. [Richard B Doubleday, Jan Tschichold, Designer: the Penguin Years (Aldershot, U.K.: Lund Humphries 2006), 18]
Tschichold had some very particular views on typography and design. Born in Germany in 1902 he trained as a calligrapher and typographer, coming under the influence of the Bauhaus and developing a clear, Modernist mode of book-cover and page design. Arrested by the Nazis in 1933, on suspicion of being a Communist, he eventually fled to Switzerland where he lived the rest of his life. After the war, hired by Penguin, he had come to repudiate Modernism as a passed phase, though one he considered necessary in terms of clarifying and purging ‘19th-century ornamental dross.’ Indeed, he argued that ‘in its ordering zeal Modernism had shared in the spirit that informed National Socialism.’ His postwar work adapts traditional modes, cleanly typefaces and uncluttered design spaces into carefully structured spaces. These are from Tschichold’s Ausgewählte Aufsätze über Fragen der Gestalt des Buches und der Typographie (1975), translated into English as The Form of the Book (1991):
This is the ‘Van der Graaf canon’, supposedly dividing the page into the most pleasing proportions. And here is Tschichold’s schematisation of medieval manuscript proportions: ‘page proportion 2:3 — margin proportions 1:1:2:3 — text area proportioned in the Golden Section.’
I grew up in a home with loads of1950s Penguin paperbacks, which my parents had bought in their youth, and to this day I still own a great many. The shift to other designs in the 1960s and 1970s, fully illustrated covers, greater variety, also populates my bookshelves, although it is not so satisfying aesthetically, but even here the designers worked from Tschichold’s templates. Here’s a 1960s design-scaffold for Penguin Crime covers, still green, like the very first Penguin crime titles, but now balanced and proportioned after the Tschicholdian manner.
Here’s are a couple of Tschichold’s actual designs.
Tschichold’s design here incorporates woodcuts by Reynolds Stone. The cover is set in Monotype Perpetua, entirely in upper-case, and the interior in Bembo. And his design for the 1948 Penguin Through the Looking Glass wittily replicates itself mirrored on the back cover — everything flipped except the price, as if money is too powerful a force to succumb to such mutation.
And here is the Penguin Shakespeare cover, before and after Tschichold’s intervention. The pre-T woodcut of WS, with its oddly heavy nasal shadow like a Hitler-moustache, and its clumsy spread of elements, looks doltish beside the T-design.
And here is a Tschichold Pelican title:
A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
May puts all Heaven in a Rage
But aRobin Redbreast on some books
Makes us say how nice that looks!
When Tschichold departed London for Switzerland in 1949, Hans Schmoller took over as chief designer, a position he occupied until 1976. He moved Penguin covers in the direction of more prominent and sometimes wraparound art, although he cleaved to many of Tschichold’s design principles. Here’s his 1962 War of the Worlds:
… and here some comic verse.
