Welcome to The Art of Penguin Science Fiction where, one way or another, you have arrived at this introduction to a website that explores the history and cover
art of science fiction published by Penguin Books from 1935 to the present day. But first of all some answers to the questions: why Penguin, and why science fiction?
Penguin Books was founded by Allen Lane in 1935 as a paperback imprint of The Bodley Head publishing house. The new venture was an immediate success, and enabled Penguin
to become established as a separate company early in 1936. An important factor in this success was the books' eye-catching cover design, which featured two
horizontal bands of colour – orange for fiction, green for crime, blue for biography – separated by a third, white band on which the title and author's
name were printed. These simple yet striking covers gave the books a refreshing, modern look and remained in use for many years, acquiring iconic status along the way as
examples of classic twentieth-century design.
This status was reaffirmed as recently as January 2009, when the UK's Royal Mail issued a commemorative set of ten stamps celebrating British Design
Classics. Among the ten designs chosen to appear on the stamps were a double-decker bus, a red telephone box, the London Underground map, and the orange-and-white
cover of a Penguin book.
So Penguin books and their iconic covers have a place in history that merits study and appreciation. They have influenced generations of readers and played an important
role in our cultural heritage. Over the years new cover designs have appeared, and in the 1950s a transition took place from typographical to pictorial covers. This was
followed by the intro- duction of a radically new cover design in the 1960s, and the launch of a Penguin science fiction series with covers featuring reproductions of
abstract and surrealist paintings.
This curious linkage of modern art and sf is at the heart of this website, and is made all the more intriguing by the subtle and often ingenious connections between the
artworks and the stories within. Following on from this, Penguin continued to publish sf as a number of mini-series, with covers that reveal the influence of Pop Art and
to some extent Op Art. But to put these later developments in perspective it is necessary to go back to the first sf titles that Penguin published in the 1930s, for these
early covers, now celebrated on a stamp, have come to be regarded as artworks in their own right.
Until recently the history of Penguin sf and its cover art has been largely overlooked. This website, along with a series of articles on the subject, attempts to rectify
this. But what the articles convey with words this website does with images, and thereby offers what words cannot: over 400 Penguin sf covers and the ability to trace
their evolution at the click of a button as titles were reprinted and different covers came and went. As such this website complements the articles, which focus more on
the science fiction and its linkage to each book's cover art. Here, however, it is the covers them- selves that light the way along the multiple paths that weave
through the history, and art, of Penguin science fiction.
One final point: the Penguin sf covers presented here are neither exhaustive nor intended to be. Aesthetics are every- thing for a website called The Art of Penguin
Science Fiction and in this regard some of the covers have little to offer. Thus they are excluded, and the coverage (no pun intended) is rather more selective after
1965. For as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent".
Publication Dates
The Penguin publication dates used on this website up to 1970 are taken from The Penguin Catalogue: A Complete Cata- logue of the Publications of Penguin Books,
otherwise known as Q100. An asterisk after the date indicates that it is later than the publication date given on the copyright page of the book itself, which was
presumably published later than planned. Dates after 1970 are derived from various sources, such as the Penguin Archive held at the University of Bristol.
Further Reading
Penguin
William Emrys Williams. The Penguin Story, 1935-1956. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956.
Linda Lloyd Jones and Jeremy Aynsley. Fifty Penguin Years. London: Penguin, 1985.
Phil Baines. Penguin by Design: A Cover Story, 1935-2005. London: Penguin, 2005.
Science Fiction
Kingsley Amis. New Maps of Hell. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1960.
Brian Aldiss. Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973.
Edward James. Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, 1994.
John Clute. Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia. London: Dorling Kindersley, 1995.
Penguin Science Fiction
James Pardey. 'The Art of Penguin Science Fiction.' The Penguin Collector, No 71, December 2008.
—. 'The Art of More Penguin Science Fiction.' The Penguin Collector, No 72, June 2009.
—. 'The Art of Yet More Penguin Science Fiction.' The Penguin Collector, No 73, December 2009.
—. 'Landscapes From a Dream.' Vector Magazine, No 261, Autumn 2009.