Penguin by Design: “Good Design Is No More Expensive Than Bad”

In 1935, British publisher Sir Allen Lane found himself on a train platform at Exeter railway station, looking for a good book for the ride to London. Disappointed with the limited and unseemly options available, he eventually founded Penguin Books, famously declaring that “good design is no more expensive than bad.” He revolutionized the publishing industry in the 1930s with its affordable and beautifully designed paperbacks, and Penguin eventually went on to become the world’s largest publishing empire, overtaking Random House in 2009. Best known and loved for its paperback covers, the iconic publisher has become a living record of the evolution of contemporary design.

In Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005, graphic designer Phil Baines charts the development of Penguin’s iconic legacy, from the evolution of the Penguin logo itself to the seminal introduction of Romek Marber’s simple cover grid in 1962, which reined in a new era of cover design.

In more than 250 glorious pages, the book features over 600 gorgeous, vibrant illustrations that tell the story of the most monumental testament to the power of graphic design in packaging and disseminating culture.

Images by Robin Benson

As a wonderful companion to the book, you won’t go wrong with Postcards from Penguin: One Hundred Book Covers in One Box — a lovely collection of exactly what the title promises, featuring 100 different Penguin book jackets spanning 70 years of iconic literature, from crime to classics.

And we’d be remiss not to remind you of Coralie Bickford-Smith’s remarkable classics covers, by far our favorite Penguin designs of all time.

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Susan Sontag: A Trifecta Remembrance

What frontpage news has to do with graphic design and the craftsmanship of the self.

Today marks the 6th anniversary of the death of Susan Sontag, one of my big intellectual heroes and favorite authors. From her seminal treatise On Photography, required reading in any serious photography class around the world, to her poignant observations on human suffering in Regarding the Pain of Others to her status as an honorary citizen of Sarajevo due to her relentless activism during the Sarajevo Siege of the mid-90s, Sontag’s cultural legacy is as far-reaching as it is wide-spanning.

Today, I take a moment to remember her with three essential cultural artifacts that celebrate her work and capture her spirit — an interview, an essay and an animated short fim.

THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW

Earlier this year, the iconic Paris Review opened up its archive to make available half a century worth of interviews with literary legends and cultural luminaries. In the journal’s 137th issue, published in the winter of 1995, Susan Sontag gives a priceless interview that reveals more of her countless facets than any other public inquiry into her rich, fascinating persona.

Of course I thought I was Jo in Little Women. But I didn’t want to write what Jo wrote. Then in Martin Eden I found a writer-protagonist with whose writing I could identify, so then I wanted to be Martin Eden—minus, of course, the dreary fate Jack London gives him. I saw myself as (I guess I was) a heroic autodidact. I looked forward to the struggle of the writing life. I thought of being a writer as a heroic vocation.” ~ Susan Sontag

DESIGN OBSERVER REMEMBERS

The day after Sontag passed away in 2004, Design Observer founder Bill Drenttel wrote a thoughtful and personal essay on his experience of knowing Sontag as her son’s close friend and how her keen intellectual curiosity applied to the essence of the design profession.

Susan was the most intelligent person I have ever met. She was intense, challenging, passionate. She listened in the same way that she read: acutely and closely. There was little patience for a weak argument. She assumed, often wrongly, that you possessed a general level of knowledge that would challenge even most college-educated professionals. She assumed you knew a lot and that you were interested in everything precisely because she was so interested in everything. Anything less left her unsatisfied, and, as she would not suffer fools, she wanted every encounter to be one in which she learned something.” ~ William Drenttel

REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS

Regarding the Pain of Others was Sontag’s final book, published a few months before her death in 2004. In what’s partly a sequel to On Photography, a quarter century later, partly a tremendously important larger conversation about the role of visual media in war. In it, Sontag sets out to answer the quintessential question posed in Virginia Woolf’s book Three Guineas: “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?”

This simple yet beautifully crafted and powerful short animation, narrated by Sontag herself, uses the single most universal touchpoint with war — mass media — as a raw visual metaphor for the cultural criticism at the heart of Sontag’s book: Our media-driven desensitization and diminished capacity for empathy towards those truly suffering in the world.

BONUS

On Self is a priceless selection of Sontag’s private journal entries, first published in New York Times Magazine in 2006. It offers a rare glimpse of Sontag’s “four selves,” revealing the meticulous craftsmanship of her public persona and the raw tenderness of her private self. For more of that, see the excellent Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947–1963.

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Return of the Dapper Men: Tim Gunn Meets Alice in Wonderland

What would you get if you crossed Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, and Tim Gunn? Return of the Dapper Men, that’s what — a lyrical and impressionistic new tale by Jim McCann with charming illustration by Janet Lee and a foreword by, yes, quintessential modern dapper man Tim Gunn.

It’s the story of a human boy named Ayden, a robot girl named Zoe, and 34 Dapper Men who restart the world they live in — a world without time or progress, which only robots and children who never grow up inhabit. It’s part remarkably crafted graphic novel, part beautifully told morality tale, part something else entirely.

Return of the Dapper Men is as much a wonderful and whimsical piece of children’s literature as it is a timeless and profound meditation on individualism, community, change and permanence — which makes it a fine addition to both our favorite children’s literature of 2010 and our top five children’s books with philosophy for grown-ups.

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My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Modernist Fairy Tales

There’s hardly a genre older and more familiar yet timeless and relentlessly captivating than the fairy tale, and no one breathes new air into this classic blend of folklore and morality better than author and editor Kate Bernheimer. Her latest gem, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales is an ambitious anthology of 40 modernist fairy tales inspired by classic folktales from around the world and organized roughly by country of origin. With stories by some of today’s greatest fiction writers, including Neil Gaiman, Michael Cunningham, Aimee Bender and Lydia Millet, the book is a literary treasure chest, like the one in your grandmother’s attic where the whimsical and the macabre come to life on cold winter evenings as logs crackle in the fireplace downstairs.

Once you start looking, it is easy to see the variety — the sheer fractal ferocity — and intelligence of fairy tales. This collection contains stories reflective of current trends; it also contains stories told in more linear, straightforward ways. Some of the selections pay homage to midcentury and later styles; others come poetically through modes associated with the tradition of oral folklore. You will find stories that hew closely to their enchantment, and others that announce hardly any magic — until you encounter a tiny keyhole in the wall of their language. In each instance, you will easily enter these secret gardens.” ~ Kate Bernheimer

Beautifully written and utterly enchanted, the stories draw on everything from Hans Christian Andersen’s and Brothers Grimm’s classics to the popular entertainment of medieval Japan to fairy tales by Goethe and Calvino. Brimming with dark whimsy and gorgeous grotesqueness, the imaginative tome is an absolute treat for readers of all ages — so go ahead and treat yourself.

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