The Art of Penguin Science Fiction examines the history and cover art of science fiction published by Penguin Books.
Penguin Books was launched in 1935 as a paperback imprint of The Bodley Head and became a separate company early the following year. The books were extremely popular and
instantly recognisable by their eye-catching covers, which featured two horizontal bands of colour – orange for fiction, green for crime, blue for biography –
separated by a third, white band containing the title and author's name. This simple yet striking cover design gave the books a modern look and remained in use for
many years, eventually acquiring iconic status as a design classic.
This status was reaffirmed in 2009 when the UK's Royal Mail issued a set of commemorative stamps featuring ten British design classics, for
among the designs that appeared on the stamps were a double-decker bus, a telephone box and a 1930s Penguin book.
So Penguin Books and its banded covers has played its part in our cultural heritage, and the books themselves have influenced generations of readers. In the 1950s the
covers changed to vertical bands and illustrated covers were introduced, followed by a radically new cover design, the Marber grid, in the early 1960s. Then came the
launch of a science fiction series featuring abstract and surrealist cover art by Max Ernst, Paul Klee, René Magritte and others, a pairing of sf and modern art
that is all the more intriguing for the subtle and often ingenious connections between each book's cover painting and its contents.
