Penguins

My belated discovery that H.P. Lovecraft has joined the ranks of the immortals in the Penguin Classics series got me thinking about Penguin books in general, and this book in particular:


I've always been fond of a well-designed book (I'm particularly partial to almost any hardbound from Knopf in the 70's, and similarly vintaged Vintage paperbacks), but there is only one publishing company whose total output would be worthy of an in-depth design survey. It's hard to think of any other publisher with as distinctive a line-look as Penguin. They pretty much own the color orange, and a half-dozen or so sans-serif typefaces as well.

I've always been partial to the English Library series, with their orange spines, their Helvetica logotype, and their beautiful cover illustrations (always a piece of art from the era in which the book was written, usually from a picture library called Snark International). Given a choice at the bookstore between a Signet, Bantam or Penguin edition of the same title, I usually reached for the Penguin. If I look over my bookshelf (which basically involves rotating my chair 180 degrees from my desk), I can't help but thinking there's a lot of orange there. (And some black too, for the translated editions.)



The Penguin Design book is a fascinating read if, like me, you're into such things as the Corvenus family of typefaces and horizontal tripartite cover grids, but I was disappointed to find virtually nothing on the English Library series in the entire book. Those beloved orange spines which have graced the shelves of every house I have lived in for the past 38 years -- who designed them? What were the production standards? And what the heck was Snark International, anyway?

Fortunately, I was able to find this terrific article online by Googling (ta-da!) "Snark International." Turns out the Classics look was the work of Germano Facetti, who was Penguin's art director from 1960 through 1972, and who had founded (ta-da!) Snark International a few years before joining Penguin. A touch of nepotism in the constant usage of his former company's product? Maybe. But in odd moments I still reach for an orange spine just for the pleasure of seeing one of those great paintings or sketches from the Snark library. (And often wind up just rereading the whole book.)

A small sampling of Facetti's masterpieces: