Contextual Research of Penguin Book Cover Design

Penguin Book cover design Graphic Design BA1a Contextual Studies Research Report Barbara Wei

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Contents

1 Introduction p.4

An introduction of the contextual research

2 Mindmap p.5

Visual illustration of the conceptual journey and overall structure of the investigation

3 Annotated text -1 p.6 -2 p.8 -3 p.10 -4 p.13

An annotated text accompanied by a short summary of the main ideas of the text

4 Image analysis p.16

Images analysis describing and commenting the design choices made by the designer

5 Referencing p.18

A short paragraph with comments about three quotes

6 Evaluation p.20

Reflection about the research report

7 Bibliography p.22

Sources used compiling the assessment

8 Other material p.24

Other research and exploration

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Introduction

Penguin Book has a long history. In many bookstores, it is not hard to find Penguin Books. Penguin Book Publishing remains a very famous Publishing house. They are not only selling the stories within but also they are selling the book design. How is it that the good book cover design helps to sell books? It is therefore interesting to take a deep look into book design. Over years and years, many thousands of books have been published. And now in this digital era, paper books must also follow the changing steps to interact with this new world. Regarding this point, the book cover should be the first thing that reader sees. The history of Penguin’s book cover designs tells through the time the company’s own story. I would like to examine how different book cover designs through time and I also want to research the reasons that they change and challenges that they are faced with. I would like to spend time listening to their story and getting know more about book publishing.

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Mindmap

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Annotated text1

7 summery

The Penguin cover designs opted for simplicity. The designs featured three simple, horizontal bands: the top and bottom bands colour-coded to represent the series to which the title belonged.

Typographer Jan Tschichold refined the simple design following a Bauhaus ideology, he also insisted on the intentional and deliberate use of white space. White space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background, in his thought. Many other Modernist design rules are used to quickly and easily convey information in Penguin books, such as the use of a structured typographical hierarchy.

In the series, they also present subtle changes and subversions of the branding, such as the process of design evolution from using drop caps to the use of modern typography. Typography can convey so much, not only in the words it spells out, but also in the aesthetic qualities of the individual letters. So does the interesting idea of

changing the use of drop cap for a modernist design. Not only the usability by marking important passages and guiding readers through the text but also create a new way that features a rainbow-hued spectrum across the 26 books.

Each letter represents the surname of the books author.

In this interesting part, you can see drop cap is also an important design detail in book design.

Over the years, the Penguin logo and cover designs have seen many iterations, some have rebelled, others have stayed true to the simplicity of the original designs.

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Annotated text2

9 summery

As paperbacks evolved, so did ideas of how they should appear and how they should reach their intended market.

Penguin books, first published in 1935, were the first massmarket paperbacks in Britain. The vision of Allen, John, Richard Lane, Penguin began life as an imprint of The Bodley Head.

This book will show that the story of Penguin cover design is far more interesting and complicated than first impressions might suggest.

Graphic design, this discipline, combining strategic thinking, a strong visual sense, organizational ability and the craft skills to implement them all, only developed slowly.

The dilemma from any publisher's point of view is whether to use a cover to promote them or the individual title. Part of the fascination of studying book covers is in seeing these tensions played out in practice. For Penguin, at first glance,

it would seem that in the 1930s the publisher's identity was the most important aspect of the design; today it would be easy to suggest that on many titles the publisher is invisible.

This book, it aims to show the main changes in design and to suggest that Penguin covers are about far more than three colored stripes and a dancing bird.

Explain the main strands of the history, to introduce significant titles, series or designs, and to show, when possible, covers that have not been reproduced in this way before.

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Annotated text3

11 summery

From the early fifties on, Penguin’s front covers used illustration and photography. There is the broadest range of styles in Penguin covers, while thousands of the famous Penguin three-panel(‘tri-part’)covers were used from1935 to the early fifties, in this book you’ll only find about a dozen.

Most of the covers are British, there are also inspired covers from Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and South Africa.

In-house Penguin cover designer(and designer of this book) David Pearson. David has always championed quintessentially Penguin design and was the motivating force behind Penguin by Design(2005).

We’re still too close to more recent covers to judge them objectively, look back at the twentieth century with a cool sense of detachment and see those books with fresh eyes.

There are many fans of the elegant and perfectly measured covers designed by Jan Tschichold. There are also many admirers of books using arrestion illustrations by David Pelham and plenty who enjoy the visual witticisms of Derek

Birdsall. And we are all drawn to countless innovative mutations of Romek Marber’s remarkable Penguin-saving grid template.

But flicking through this book it’s often the least expected things that catch your eye, and often, without any formula at all, a cover manages to capture a moment even though many aspects of it are not necessarily ’well designed’ or even coherent. It’s these covers that, while often transcending all design logic, somehow sum up a book and its resonance perfectly.

While putting together this book there have been heated debates about what makes a good or bad book cover. What we’ve realized is that there is no one-size-fits-all formula for a great cover. What some people love, others hate. The curious twist is that the older a paperback is, the greater its appeal. So many Penguin paperbacks in particular have the power to evoke such warmth and affection.

It’s likely that some of these books act as conduits for our

12 own memories. These fragile- almost disposable- books have travelled through our lives with us. They are a repository of memories, and Seven Hundred Penguins is a place of memories we have all experienced. An individual book can reveal idiosyncrasies about its owner. Collectively, books disclose a lot about a person.

Considered design is a quality a publisher can never regret, and we still reinforce it’s importance wholeheartedly today.

There are so many unexpected charming choices.

So in this book what we’ve published, designs we’ve fostered, designers and artists who have worked with us. On these pages are either A format(181mm*111mm) or the larger B format(198mm*129mm), the two most common book sizes.

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Annotated text4

14 summery

The King Penguin series, which covered art, science, leisure, and world history, was Penguin’s first series to be printed in color and in hardcover. With improvements in color printing, particularly for small-scale colour plates and pictorial covers as attractive collector’s items for the general reader. Tschichold decided that the overall redesign of the King Penguins would emulate the prominent and much admired Insel-Verlag picture books from Germany. For King Penguins, Tschichold used unusual classic typefaces. Often these typeface choices were dictated by their suitability to the books’ subject matter and the type of paper they were to be printed on.

Of particular note in the King Penguin series is A Book of Scripts by Alfred Fairbank. Tschichold adapted the cover design from a page in Arte Subtilissima by Juan de Yciar, one of Tschichold’s early influences. He utilized his early training as a calligrapher by drawing the roman capitals with a pen and brush by hand on the front and back cover panels, carefully restoring them to their original shapes.

15 The National Book League in England recognised this title as one of the best-designed books of 1949.

The Penguin Classics, were launched in January 1946, as a new series of translations of Greek, French, and Latin classics, including such titles as Old Goriot, Crime and Punishment, and the Odyssey. These titles appealed to the many serious readers looking for foreign literature translated into English.

The original Penguin Classics cover design was disordered, and its elements did not complement each other.

Tschichold reintroduced the common monochromatic color-coding system around the frame. He also added a thick patterned rule just within the frame. The illustrated engravings and roundels appearing on the covers and throughout the interior spreads were commissioned by prominent English designers and artists such as Elizabeth Friedlander and Berthold Wolpe. The roundels were iconic representations of the characters in the story, adding

personality and a finishing touch to the design.

One notable masterpiece from the series of Penguin Classics is Tschichold’s book design for The Transformations of Lucius. The book’s detail included beige cloth with gilded stamped lettering on a vellum spine, with vellum tips, finished by hand to reinforce the spine and binding and minimise damage while handing. He added two rules of different weights for visual support within the spine. The book was protected with a tan dustwrap and fitted inside a two-colour card stock slipcase. What makes this design unique is the harmony and clarity achieved

by Tschichold’s centered arrangements, typographic groupings, and relationships.

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Image analysis

This is an instruction or ‘grid’ for King Penguin Standard.

Design by Jan Tschichold.

In King Penguin K48, it doesn’t use the style of the standard style.

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Referencing

The other thing he learned on the Great Ideas books was how to balance the competing challenges of giving each cover a sense of individuality while maintaining cohesion across the collection. “Limitations – self-imposed or otherwise – can be very useful since they provide something to push against,” he says. “They can also make a daunting, large-scale project seem manageable in that a myriad of potential choices can be eliminated, leaving us to focus only on what is essential. Choosing typography as the primary source of imagery is one such limitation. Adopting a limited colour palette is another, and knowing that these are my only weapons can feel incredibly liberating when beginning a job.

Pearson has brought the insides of books to their outsides. He sees the book as a complete artefact, whose paper, binding, typography, cover, endpapers, etc., all contribute to the reader’s experience of the content.

“Series design provides a unique opportunity to utilise cumulative effect. For example, key content can be removed from one cover since it can be found on others in the series, which then promotes inquiry from book-tobook.”

Each is set in a manner suggestive of the lettering or typography of the time of the work’s first publication.

This gives the appearance in many cases on an oldfashioned title page.

-It’s Nice That. (2017).

‘He’s made series book design fashionable again,’ says Dixon, ‘making things that people want a whole set of.’

‘I like detailing,’ says Pearson. ‘I have a lot of patience. I like collecting things, systems, micro-detailing and putting them in order. It’s like a big puzzle.’

-Eye magazine(2010).

-Baines (2005).

19 In the Great Ideas books series, David Pearson decided to let the flavor of each individual text influence the look of its cover. Each is set in a manner suggestive of the lettering or typography of the time of the work's first publication. This gives the appearance in many cases on an old-fashioned title page. He learned how to balance the competing challenges of giving each cover a sense of individuality while maintaining cohesion across the collection. “Limitations – self-imposed or otherwise – can be very useful since they provide something to push against,” he says. “They can also make a daunting, large-scale project seem manageable in that a myriad of potential choices can be eliminated, leaving us to focus only on what is essential. Choosing typography as the primary source of imagery is one such limitation.

Adopting a limited color palette is another, and knowing that these are my only weapons can feel incredibly liberating when beginning a job.”

David Pearson has brought the insides of books to their outsides. He sees the book as a complete artifact, whose paper, binding, typography, cover, endpapers, etc., all contribute to the reader’s experience of the content.

‘He’s made series book design fashionable again,’ says Catherine Dixon, ‘making things that people want a whole set of.’ ‘I like detailing,’ says Pearson. ‘I have a lot of patience. I like collecting things, systems, micro-detailing and putting them in order. It’s like a big puzzle.’

By limitations, you can focus on the essential point of the whole, this is not an easy task, choosing a detail and create this detail into limitation. I really like the motivate to limit yourself, when you only you a color or typography how to make things work.

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Evaluation

I love reading, reading poems, novels. I love books.

Spending so many time in the bookstore, Penguin books are the most attracting books which catch my eyes. I would like to do more research on Penguin's book covers design and their design history.

Doing the contextual research, I read many books from the design of Penguin covers to Jan Tschichold's life and works. It gave me a lot of fun during the time reading and learning the detail of graphics decision which designer made. Searching the related articles on websites and online journal.

At first, I only searched on Penguin's website and found few related articles of their book cover design, therefore I decided to change in a different way for researching. I investigated the graphic designers who work in Penguin, and I found out the famous and important designer-Jan Tschichold who made a huge achievement in Penguin, along with this founding, enlarging my research directions.

The difficulty for me is reading complicated English grammar, I spent a lot of time on looking up the dictionary,

but as the knowledge come into my brain I feel myself learning a lot.

Then it comes out some material, things like Penguin's logo development and the composition rule created by Jan Tschichold, I found that I can put in the other material to enrich my research. It always has the connection between a material to the material because getting more from here can make you go there. This is why for me, doing research is interesting, you can getting thousands of inspiration in a little part.

When you start to find the material you needed is difficult to get into a topic directly because at first, you have nothing, but gradually you will get more information on it. I learned how to expand my research ways, from listening to some podcasts to find is there anything in my topics, to flipping through magazines to get some new inspirations. Although I find nothing in these way, it still gave me the opportunity of learning.

21 When I am doing the image analyze, I start from a book cover I feel interested, and I start to find the detail and important message inside the cover image. I get the model frame of the King Penguin series and the information of the image from books. When I know how this image from, I searched the history and background to understand why Jan Tschichold will do the calligraphy. And got the answer and reason. I enjoyed in this step.

Start doing the beginning and the after will come to you.

This is the point I learn in my contextual research.

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Bibliography

Books

Baines, P. (2005). Penguin by design. London [etc.]: Penguin.

Jong, C., Purvis, A. and Coultre, M. (2008). Jan Tschichold. London: Thames & Hudson.

McLean, R. (1975). Jan Tschichold: typographer.

London: Lund Humphries.

Postcards From Penguin.

(2009). Penguin Books Ltd. Seven hundred penguins.

(2007). London: Penguin.

Websites

Christies.com. (2017).

ICIĂ R, Juan de (B. 1522). <I>Arte subtilissima, por la qual se ensena a escrevir perfectamente, hecho y experimentado, y agora; de nuevo anadido</I>.

Zaragoza: Pedro Bernuz, 1550.. [online] Available at: http://www.christies.com/ lotfinder/Lot/iciar-juan-deb-1522-arte-subtilissima5662761-details.aspx?sc_ lang=zh [Accessed 14 Oct. 2017].

En.izhsh.com.cn. (2017).

Jan Tschichold at Penguin Books: A Resurgence of Classical Book Design -Chinese Journal of Design : zhuangshi. [online] Available at: http://en.izhsh. com.cn/articles/10/1_195. html [Accessed 14 Oct. 2017].

En.wikipedia.org. (2017).

Juan de Yciar. [online] Available at: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Juan_de_Yciar [Accessed 14 Oct. 2017].

En.wikipedia.org. (2017).

Penguin Books. [online] Available at: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Penguin_Books [Accessed 12 Oct. 2017].

Right Reading. (2017).

A Spanish Renaissance calligraphy manual. [online] Available at: http://www. rightreading.com/blog/artand-illustration/typography/ spanish-renaissancecalligraphy/ [Accessed 14 Oct. 2017].

Its Nice That. (2017). Cover Stories: Former Penguin designer David Pearson talks us through his

23 favourite covers. [online] Available at: https://www. itsnicethat.com/features/ cover-stories-formerpenguin-designer-davidpearson-talks-us-throughhis-favourite-covers [Accessed 22 Oct. 2017].

The Writersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Academy.

(2017). What Penguin Books Can Teach You About Front Cover Design. [online] Available at: http://www. thewritersacademy.co.uk/ blog/book-cover-design/ [Accessed 9 Oct. 2017].

Journal

David Pearson: inside out. (2010). Eye magazine, [online] 20(77). Available at: http://www.eyemagazine. com/feature/article/ david-pearson-inside-out [Accessed 22 Oct. 2017].

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Other materials

Penguin Composition Rules

25 Logo development

26 Stroy (Establishing Paperback Publishing) 1935-1946

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28 Penguinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s imprints and series Penguin Classics

May 1938 with the issue of Penguin Illustrated Classics.

The books were distinct from the rest of the Penguin marque in their use of a vertical grid (anticipating Tschichold's innovation of 1951) and albertus typeface.

The series was not a financial success.Penguin returned to classics with the printing of E. V. Rieu's translation of Homer's Odyssey in 1946, which went on to sell three million copies.

The imprint publishes hundreds of classics from the Greeks and Romans to Victorian Literature to modern classics.

For nearly twenty years, variously coloured borders to the front and back covers indicated the original language.

The second period of design meant largely black covers with a colour illustration on the front. In 2002, Penguin announced it was redesigning its entire catalogue, merging the original Classics list (known in the trade as "Black Classics") with what had been the old Penguin TwentiethCentury Classics list, though the silver covers for the latter have so far been retained for most of the titles. Previously

this line had been called 'Penguin Modern Classics' with a pale green livery.

The redesign â&#x20AC;&#x201D; featuring a colourful painting on the cover, with black background and orange lettering â&#x20AC;&#x201D; was well received. However, the quality of the paperbacks themselves seemed to decrease: the spines were more likely to fold and bend. The paperbacks are also printed on non-acid-free pulp paper, which, by some accounts, tends to yellow and brown within a couple of years.

The text page design was also overhauled to follow a more closely prescribed template, allowing for faster copyediting and typesetting, but reducing the options for individual design variations suggested by a text's structure or historical context (for example, in the choice of text typeface).

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30 Pelican Books

Lane expanded the business in 1937 with the publication of George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism under the Pelican Books imprint, an imprint designed to educate the reading public.

Several thousand Pelicans were published over the next half-century and brought high quality accounts of the current state of knowledge in many fields, often written by authors of specialised academic books. (The Pelican series, in decline for several years, was finally discontinued in 1984.)

Pelican Books was relaunched as a digital imprint in 2014, with four books published simultaneously on 1 May: Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang, The Domesticated Brain by the psychologist Bruce Hood, Revolutionary Russia by Orlando Figes and Human Evolution by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar.

31 Penguin Education

In 1965 Penguin entered the field of educational publishing, Allen Laneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s aim being to carry the radical and populist spirit of Pelicans into the schoolbook market.

Among the most successful and influential series were Voices and Junior Voices, Connexions, and the Penguin English Project.

Penguin Education also published an extensive range of Readers and introductory texts for students in higher education. Following Allen Laneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death in 1970 and the takeover the same year by Pearson Longman, the division discontinued publishing school books and was closed in March 1974. More than 80 teachers, educational journalists and academics signed a letter to the Times Educational Supplement regretting the closure of the influential imprint

32 Penguin Specials

In November 1937, Penguin inaugurated a new series of short, polemical books under the rubric of Penguin Specials with the publication of Edgar Mowrer's Germany Puts the Clock Back. Their purpose was to offer in-depth analysis of current affairs that would counter the perceived bias of the newspapers in addition to being the company's response to the popularity of Gollancz's Left Book Club.

This brief period of revival for Penguin Specials in contributing to the national dialogue was not sustained after the departure of Godwin in 1967, and with the rise in television journalism the Specials series declined in significance through the 1970s and 1980s. The last Special was published in 1988 with Keith Thompson's Under Siege: Racism and Violence in Britain Today.

In December 2011, Penguin launched nine titles as 'Penguin Shorts' which featured the iconic tri-band covers. In 2012 they became known as Penguin Specials following an agreement with The Economist in March of that year which focused on the kind of topical journalism that was a feature of the original Penguin Specials.

33 Puffin

Noel Carrington, an editor at Country Life magazine, first approached Lane with the idea of publishing lowcost, illustrated non-fiction children's books in 1938.

Carrington's suggestion for what was to become the Puffin Picture Book series was adopted by Penguin in 1940 when, as Lane saw it, evacuated city children would need books on farming and natural history to help adjust to the country. The first four titles appeared in December 1940.

Inexpensive paperback children's fiction did not exist at the time Penguin sought to expand their list into this new market. To this end Eleanor Graham was appointed in 1941 as the first editor of the Puffin Story Books series, a venture made particularly difficult due to the resistance of publishers and librarians in releasing the rights of their children's books.

Graham retired in 1961 and was replaced by Kaye Webb who presided over the department for 18 years in a period that saw greatly increased competition in the children's market as well as a greater sophistication in production and marketing.

One innovation of Webb's was the creation of the Puffin Club in 1967 and its quarterly magazine Puffin Post, which at its height had 200,000 members.

Tony Lacey took over Webb's editorial chair in 1979 at the invitation of Penguin managing director Peter Mayer when Puffin was one of the few profitable divisions of the beleaguered company. In line with Mayer's policy of more aggressive commercialisation of the Penguin brand Lacey reduced the number of Puffin imprints, consolidated popular titles under the Puffin Classics rubric and inaugurated the successful interactive gamebook series Fighting Fantasy. Complimentary to the Puffin Club the Puffin School Book Club, addressed specifically to schools and organisations, grew significantly in this period helping to confirm Puffin market position such that by 1983 one in three Penguin books sold was a Puffin.

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35 Magazine publishing

Wartime paper rationing, which had resulted in a generous allocation to Penguin, also forced the reduction in space for book reviews and advertising in the newspapers and was partly the cause of the folding of several literary journals, consequently left a gap in the magazine market that Lane hoped to fill. In January 1941 the first issue of Penguin New Writing appeared and instantly dominated the market with 80,000 copies sold compared to its closest rival, Cyril Connolly's Horizon Penguin New Writing's editor John Lehmann was instrumental in introducing the British public to such new writers as Lawrence Durrell, Saul Bellow and James Michie. Yet despite popular and critical success further rationing and, after 1945 declining sales, led monthly publication to become quarterly until the journal finally closed in autumn 1950 after 40 issues.

Though New Writing was the most durable of Penguin's periodicals it wasn't the publisher's only foray into journalism.

36 The Buildings of England

Nikolaus Pevsner first proposed a series of volumes amounting to a county by county survey of the monuments of England in ten or more books to both the Cambridge University Press and Routledge before the war, however for various reason his plan came to nothing. It was only through his involvement with Penguin that he was in a position to make a similar suggestion to Allen Lane and be accepted. Pevsner described the project of the Buildings of England as an attempt to fill the gap in English publishing for those multi-volume survey of national art familiar on the continent.

Though Pevsner's ambition for the series was to educate and inform the general public on the subtleties of English architectural history, the immediate commercial imperative was competition with the Shell Guides edited by John Betjeman of which 13 had been published by 1939 With Lane's agreement in 1945 Pevsner began work personally touring the county that was to be the subject of observation aided by notes drawn up by researchers. The first volume, Cornwall, appeared in 1951.

Nevertheless, Pevsner's synoptic study brought rigorous architectural history to an appreciative mass audience, and in particular he enlarged the perception of the Victorian achievement in architecture.

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38 Popular Penguins

Penguin's Australian subsidiary released the Popular Penguins series late in 2008. The series has its own website. It was intended to include 50 titles, many of which duplicate those on the Penguin Celebrations list but this was reduced to 49 titles as one of the 50, Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky, had to be withdrawn after its initial release as Penguin discovered they no longer held the rights to it.

Popular Penguins are presented as a return to Lane's original ethos â&#x20AC;&#x201C; good books at affordable prices.

Popular Penguins are presented in a more "authentic" interpretation of the Penguin Grid than that of the Celebrations series. They are correct size, when compared to an original 'grid-era' Penguin, and they use Eric Gill's typefaces in a more or less exact match for Jan Tschichold's "tidying" of Edward Young's original three panel cover design. The covers are also printed on a card stock that mirrors the look and feel of 1940s and 50s Penguin covers.

On the other hand, all of the Popular Penguins series are in Penguin Orange, and not colour-coded in the manner of the original designs and the "Celebrations" titles.

39 King Penguin Books

King Penguin Books was a series of pocket-sized monographs published by Penguin Books between 1939 and 1959. They were in imitation of the Insel-BĂźcherei series published in Germany, and were pioneer volumes for Penguins in that they were their first volumes with hard covers and their first with colour printing. The books originally combined a classic series of colour plates with an authoritative text.

Elizabeth Senior edited the series until 1941, after which Nikolaus Pevsner took over and remained editor until the end of the series. The series ran to 76 volumes.

40 Pelican History of Art

Allen Lane approached Nikolaus Pevsner in 1945 for a series of illustrated books that would match the success of the King Penguins.

Pevsner's industry quickly bore fruit with the first contracts signed by 1946 for John Summerson's Architecture in Britain, Anthony Blunt's Art and Architecture in France, and Rudolph Wittkower's Italian art and architecture, the first title Painting in Britain, 1530-1790 by Ellis Waterhouse was issued in 1953. By 1955, Pevsner produced a prospectus for the series announcing the publication of four new volumes and a plan for the rest of the series totalling 47 titles. The ambition of the series exceeded previously published multi-volume histories of art such as André Michel's Histoire de l'art (17 vols, 1905–28), the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte (25 vols, 1923–35). Forty-one volumes were published by the time Pevsner retired from editing in 1977 For Penguin the series was a departure from their commercial mainstay of paperbacks as the histories of art were the first large format, illustrated hardback books they had produced. Despite their relatively high price

they were a financial success, yet for Pevsner they were intended primarily as graduate level texts in what was, for the English speaking world, the newly emerging academic discipline of art history.

Though the 1955 plan was never fully executed—the volumes on Greek painting and sculpture, quattrocento painting and cinquecento sculpture were not written—the Pelican History remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of world art published.

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